
viSWmwB 



tTbe Ebucational 

Situation 



3obn 2)ew€i2 




Class. 




Contributions to Education 

Number III 



THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 

FOUNDED BY JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER 



CONTRIBUTIONS TO EDUCATION 

Number III 



The Educational 
Situation 



BY 

JOHN DEWEY 

PROFESSOR AND HEAD OF THE DEPARTMENTS 
OF PHILOSOPHY AND EDUCATION 



CHICAGO 

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 

1902 



THE LIBRARY OF 

CONGRESS, 
Two C0P168 Receiveb 

JAN. 20 1902 

CerVRIQMT ENTRY 

CLASS ^ XXo. No. 

2- ^1^ -^ %6 
COPY B. 



Copyright, 1902, by 

The University of Chicago 

CHICAGO, ill 






The Educational Situation 



PREFATORY WORD. 

In the following paper I have attempted 
to set forth the educational situation as it 
manifests itself in the three typical parts 
of our educational system. In so doing, I 
have revised papers originally prepared for 
three different bodies, namely, the Superin- 
tendent's section of the National Educational 
Association ; the Conference of Secondary 
Schools affiliated with the University of Chi- 
cago ; and the Harvard Teachers Association. 
If the following paper in the reading leaves with 
the reader the impression of a miscellaneous 
collection, not of an organic unity, it will 
hardly be worth while for me here to iterate 
that it is an attempt to apply a single social 
philosophy, a single educational philosophy, 
to a single problem manifested in forms that 
are only outwardly diverse. I may, however, 
be allowed to say that in each case I have 
tried to interpret the particular member of the 
school organism dealt with in its twofold rela- 
tion: to the past which has determined its 
conditions and forms ; and to the present which 
determines its aims and results — its ideals and 
its success or failure in realizing them. The 



school more than any one other social institu- 
tion stands between the past and the future ; 
it is the living present as reflection of the past 
and as prophecy of the future. To this is 
due the intensity of intellectual and moral 
interest attaching to all that concerns the 
school — if only our eyes are open to see. 

John Dewey. 
The University of Chicago. 
December 12, 1901. 



THE EDUCATIONAL SITUATION. 



I. AS CONCERNS THE ELEMENTARY 
SCHOOL. 

Horace Mann and the disciples of Pestalozzi 
did their peculiar missionary work so com- 
pletely as intellectually to crowd the conserva- 
tive to the wall. For half a century after their 
time the ethical emotion, the bulk of exhorta- 
tion, the current formulae and catchwords, the 
distinctive principles of theory have been found 
on the side of progress, of what is known as 
reform. The supremacy of self-activity, the 
symmetrical development of all the powers, 
the priority of character to information, the 
necessity of putting the real before the symbol, 
the concrete before the abstract, the necessity 
of following the order of nature and not the 
order of human convention — all these ideas, at 
the outset so revolutionary, have filtered into 
the pedagogic consciousness and become the 
commonplace of pedagogic writing and of the 
gatherings where teachers meet for inspiration 
and admonition. 

It is, however, sufficiently obvious that, while 
the reformer took possession of the field of 
9 



The Educational Situation 



theory and enthusiasm and preaching, the 
conservative, so far as concerns the course 
of study was holding his own pretty obsti- 
nately in the region of practice. He could 
afford to neglect all these sayings ; nay, he 
could afford to take a part in a glib reiter- 
ation of the shibboleths, because, as a 
matter of fact, his own work remained so 
largely untouched. He retained actual con- 
trol of school conditions ; it was he who 
brought about the final and actual contact 
between the theories and the child. And by 
the time ideals and theories had been trans- 
lated over into their working equivalents in 
the curriculum, the difference between them 
and what he as a conservative really wished 
and practiced became often the simple differ- 
ence of tweedle dum from tweedle dee. So 
the "great big battle" was fought with mutual 
satisfaction, each side having an almost com- 
plete victory in its own field. Where the re- 
former made his headway was not in the 
region of studies, but rather in that of methods 
and of atmosphere of school-work. 

In the last twenty or twenty-five years, how- 
ever, more serious attempts have been made 
to carry the theory into effective execution 
in subject-matter as well as in method. The 
unconscious insincerity in continually turning 



The Educational Situation 1 1 

the theory over and over in terms of itself, the 
unconscious self-deceit in using it simply to 
cast an idealized and emotional halo over a 
mechanical school routine with which it was 
fundamentally at odds, became somewhat 
painfully apparent ; consequently the effort to 
change the concrete school materials and 
school subject-matter so as to give the pro- 
fessed ends and aims a. pou sto within the school 
walls and in relation to the children. 

Drawing, music, nature study with the field 
excursion and the school garden, manual train- 
ing, the continuation of the constructive exer- 
cises of the kindergarten, the story and the 
tale, the biography, the dramatic episode, and 
anniversary of heroic history found their way 
into the schoolrooms. We, they proclaim, are 
the working counterparts of the commands to 
follow nature ; to secure the complete devel- 
opment of the child ; to present the real before 
the symbolic, etc. Interest was transferred 
from the region of pedagogic principles and 
ideals, as such, to the child as affected by these 
principles and ideas. The formulae of peda- 
gogics were reduced in importance, and the 
present experience of the child was magnified. 
The gospel of the emancipation of the child 
succeeded the gospel of the emancipation of 
the educational theorist. This gospel was 



12 The Educational Situation 

published abroad, and verily its day seemed at 
hand. It was apparently only a question of 
pushing a few more old fogies out of the way, 
and waiting for others to pass out of exist- 
ence in the natural course of events, and the 
long-wished-for educational reformation would 
be accomplished. 

Needless to say, the affair was not quite so 
simple. The conservative was still there. He 
was there not only as a teacher in the school- 
room, but he was there in the board of educa- 
tion ; he was there because he was still in the 
heart and mind of the parent ; because he still 
possessed and controlled the intellectual and 
moral standards and expectations of the com- 
munity. We began to learn that an educa- 
tional reform is but one phase of a general 
social modification. 

Moreover, certain evils began to show 
themselves. Studies were multiplied almost 
indefinitely, often overtaxing the physical and 
mental strength of both teacher and child, 
leading to a congestion of the curriculum, to a 
distraction and dissipation of aim and effort on 
the part of instructor and pupil. Too often 
an excess of emotional excitement and strain 
abruptly replaced the former apathy and dull 
routine of the school. There were complaints 
in every community of loss of efficiency in the 



The Educational Situation 13 

older studies, and of a letting down of the seri- 
ousness of mental training. It is not neces- 
sary to consider how well founded these 
objections have been. The fact that they are 
so commonly made, the fact that these newer 
studies are often regarded simply as fads and 
frills, is sufficient evidence of the main point, 
viz., of the external and mechanical position 
occupied by these studies in the curriculum. 
Numbers of cities throughout the country point 
the moral. When the winds blew and the rains 
fell — in the shape of a financial strmgency in 
the community and the business conduct of 
the school — the new educational edifice too 
often fell. It may not have been built entirely 
upon the sand, but at all events it was not 
founded upon a rock. The taxpayer spoke, 
and somehow the studies which represented the 
symmetrical development of the child and the 
necessity of giving him the concrete before 
the abstract went into eclipse. 

It is, of course, agreeable for those who 
believe in progress, in reform, in new ideals, to 
attribute these reactions to a hard and stiff- 
necked generation who willfully refuse to 
recognize the highest goods when they see 
them. It is agreeable to regard such as 
barbarians who are interested simply in turn- 
ing back the wheels of progress. The simple 



14 The Educational Situation 

fact, however, is that education is the one 
thing in which the American people believe 
without reserve, and to which they are without 
reserve committed. Indeed, I sometimes think 
that the necessity of education is the only 
settled article in the shifting and confused 
social and moral creed of America. If, then, 
the American public fails, in critical cases, to 
stand by the educational newcomers, it is be- 
cause these latter have not yet become organic 
parts of the educational whole — otherwise 
they could not be cut out. They are not really 
in the unity of educational movement — other- 
wise they could not be arrested. They are 
still insertions and additions. 

Consider the wave by which a new study is 
introduced into the curriculum. Someone feels 
that the school system of his (or quite fre- 
quently nowadays her) town is falling behind 
the times. There are rumors of great prog- 
ress in education making elsewhere. Some- 
thing new and important has been introduced ; 
education is being revolutionized by it; the 
school superintendent, or members of the board 
of education, become somewhat uneasy; the 
matter is taken up by individuals and clubs ; 
pressure is brought to bear on the managers of 
the school system ; letters are written to the 
newspapers ; the editor himself is appealed to 



The Educational Situation I 5 

to use his great power to advance the cause of 
progress; editorials appear ; finally the school 
board ordains that on and after a certain date 
the particular new branch — be it nature study, 
industrial drawing, cooking, manual training, 
or whatever — shall be taught in the public 
schools. The victory is won, and everybody 
— unless it be some already overburdened and 
distracted teacher — congratulates everybody 
else that such advanced steps are taking. 

The next year, or possibly the next month, 
there comes an outcry that children do not 
write or spell or figure as well as they used to ; 
that they cannot do the necessary work in the 
upper grades, or in the high school, because 
of lack of ready command of the necessary 
tools of study. We are told that they are not 
prepared for business, because their spelling is 
so poor, their work in addition and multiplica- 
tion so slow and inaccurate, their handwriting 
so fearfully and wonderfully made. Some zeal- 
ous soul on the school board takes up this 
matter; the newspapers are again heard from; 
investigations are set on foot; and the edict 
goes forth that there must be more drill in the 
fundamentals of writing, spelling, and number. 

Moreover, in the last year or two there are 
many signs that the older and traditional studies 
do not propose to be ignored. For a long time. 



1 6 The Educational Situation 

as already intimated, the conservative was, 
upon the whole, quite content to surrender the 
intellectual and emotional territory, the sphere 
of theory and of warmly toned ideals, to the 
reformer. He was content because he, after 
all, remained in possession of the field of 
action. But now there are symptoms of an- 
other attitude ; the conservative is, so to 
speak, coming to intellectual and moral con- 
sciousness himself. He is asserting that in his 
conservatism he stands for more than the mere 
customs and traditions of an outworn past. He 
asserts that he stands for honesty of work, for 
stability, for thoroughness, for singleness of 
aim and concentration of agencies, for a rea- 
sonable simplicity. He is actively probing the 
innovator. He is asking questions regarding 
the guarantees of personal and intellectual dis- 
cipline, of power of control, of ability to work. 
He is asking whether there is not danger of 
both teacher and child getting lost amid the por- 
tentous multiplication of studies. He is ask- 
ing about the leisure requisite to intellectual 
and mental digestion, and subsequent growth. 
He is asking whether there is not danger to 
integrity of character in arousing so many 
interests and impulses that no one of them is 
carried through to an effective result. These 
are not matters of mere school procedure or 



The Educational Sittiation 17 

formal arrangement of studies, but matters 
fundamental to intellectual and moral achieve- 
ment. Moreover, some recent magazine ar- 
ticles seem to indicate that some few, at least, 
of the reformers are themselves beginning to 
draw back ; they are apparently wondering if 
this new-created child of theirs be not a Frank- 
enstein, which is to turn and rend its creator. 
They seem to be saying: " Possibly we are in 
danger of going too fast and too far ; what and 
where are the limits of this thing we are 
entered upon ? " 

My sketch, however inadequate, is yet, I 
hope, true to the logic, if not to the details, of 
history. What emerges from this running 
account ? What does it all mean ? Does it not 
signify that we have a situation in process of 
forming rather than a definitive situation ? 
The history reflects both our lack of intellec- 
tual organization and also the increasing recog- 
nition of the factors which must enter into any 
such organization. From this point of view, 
the renewed self-assertion, from the standpoint 
of theory, of the adherents of the traditional 
curriculum is a matter of congratulation. It 
shows that we are emerging from a period of 
practical struggle to that of intellectual inter- 
pretation and adjustment. As yet, however, 
we have no conscious educational standard by 



1 8 The Educational Situation 

which to test and place each aspiring claimant. 
We have hundreds of reasons for and against 
this or that study, but no reason. Having no 
sense of the unity of experience, and of the 
definitive relation of each branch of study to 
that unity, we have no criterion by which to 
judge and decide. We yield to popular pres- 
sure and clamor; first on the side of the 
instinct for progress, and then on the side of 
the habit of inertia. As a result, every move- 
ment, whether for nature study or spelling, for 
picture study or arithmetic, for manual train- 
ing or more legible handwriting, is treated as 
an isolated and independent thing. It is this 
separation, this lack of vital unity, which leads 
to the confusion and contention which are so 
marked features of the educational situation. 
Lacking a philosophy of unity, we have no 
basis upon which to make connections, and 
our whole treatment becomes piecemeal, em- 
pirical and at the mercy of external circum- 
stances. 

The problem of the course of study is thus, 
in effect, a part of the larger problem so press- 
ing in all departments of the organization of 
life. Everywhere we have outgrown old meth- 
ods and standards ; everywhere we are crowded 
by new resources, new instrumentalities ; we 
are bewildered by the multitude of new oppor- 



The Educational Situation 



tunities that present themselves. Our diffi- 
culties of today come, not from paucity or 
poverty, but from the multiplication of means 
clear beyond our present powers of use and 
administration. We have got away from the 
inherited and customary; we have not come 
into complete possession and command of the 
present. Unification, organization, harmony, is 
the demand of every aspect of life — politics, 
business, science. That education shares in 
the confusion of transition, and in the demand 
for reorganization, is a source of encourage- 
ment and not of despair. It proves how inte- 
grally the school is bound up with the entire 
movement of modern life. 

The situation thus ceases to be a conflict be- 
tween what is called the old education and the 
new. There is no longer any old education, 
save here and there in some belated geo- 
graphic area. There is no new education in 
definite and supreme existence. What we 
have is certain vital tendencies. These ten- 
dencies ought to work together ; each stands 
for a phase of reality and contributes a factor 
of efficiency. But because of lack of organ- 
ization, because of the lack of unified insight 
upon which organization depends, these tend- 
encies are diverse and tangential. Too often 
we have their mechanical combination and 



20 The Educational Situation 

irrational compromise. More prophetic, be- 
cause more vital, is the confusion which arises 
from their conflict. ^ We have been putting 
new wine into old bottles, and that which was 
prophesied has come to pass. 

To recognize that the situation is not the 
wholesale antagonism of so-called old educa- 
tion to the so-called new, but a question of 
the co-operative adjustment of necessary fac- 
tors in a common situation, is to surrender our 
partisanship. It is to cease our recriminations 
and our self-conceits, and search for a more 
comprehensive end than is represented by 
either factor apart from the other. It is im- 
possible to anticipate the exact and final out- 
come of this search. Only time, and the light 
that comes with time, can reveal the answer. 
The first step, however, is to study the exist- 
ing situation as students, not as partisans, 
and, having located the vital factors in it, con- 
sider what it is that makes them at the present 
juncture antagonistic competitors instead of 
friendly co-operators. 

The question is just this : Why do the newer 
studies, drawing, music, nature study, manual 
training ; and the older studies, the three R's, 
practically conflict with, instead of reinforcing, 
one another ? Why is it that the practical 
problem is so often simply one of outward 



The Educational Situation 21 

annexation or mechanical compromise? Why 
is it that the adjustment of the conflict is left 
to the mere push and pull of contending fac- 
tors, to the pressure of local circumstances 
and of temporary reactions ? 

An answer to this question is, I believe, the 
indispensable preliminary to any future under- 
standing. Put roughly, we have two groups 
of studies ; one represents the symbols of the 
intellectual life, which are the tools of civili- 
zation itself; the other group stands for the 
direct and present expression of power on the 
part of one undergoing education, and for the 
present and direct enrichment of his life-ex- 
perience. For reasons historically adequate, 
the former group represents the traditional 
education ; the latter, the efforts of the inno- 
vator. Intrinsically speaking, in the abstract, 
there is no reason to assume any fundamental, 
or even any minor, antagonism between these 
two groups. Such an assumption would mean 
that the requirements of civilization are fun- 
damentally at war with the conditions of indi- 
vidual development ; that the agencies by 
which society maintains itself are at radical 
odds with the forms by which individual ex- 
perience is deepened and expanded. Unless 
we are ready to concede such a fundamental 
contradiction in the make-up of life, we must 



The Educational Situation 



hold that the present contention is the result 
of conditions which are local and transitory. 

I offer the following proposition as giving 
the key to the conflict : 

The studies of the symbolic and formal sort 
represented the aims and material of education 
for a sufficiently long time to call into exist- 
ence a machinery of administration and of in- 
struction thoroughly adapted to themselves. 
This machinery constituted the actual working 
scheme of administration and instruction. 
These conditions persist long after the studies 
to which they are well adapted have lost their 
theoretical supremacy. The conflict, the con- 
fusion, the compromise, is not intrinsically 
between the older group of studies and the 
newer, but between the external conditions in 
which the former were realized and the aims 
and standards represented by the newer. 

It is easy to fall into the habit of regard- 
ing the mechanics of school organization and 
administration as something comparatively 
external and indifferent to educational pur- 
poses and ideals. We think of the grouping 
of children in classes, the arrangement of 
grades, the machinery by which the course of 
study is made out and laid down, the method 
by which it is carried into effect, the system 
of selecting teachers and of assigning them to 



The Educational Situation 23 

their work, of paying and promoting them, as, 
in a way, matters of mere practical conven- 
ience and expediency. We forget that it is 
precisely such things as these that really con- 
trol the whole system, even on its distinctively 
educational side. No matter what is the ac- 
cepted precept and theory, no matter what the 
legislation of the school board or the mandate 
of the school superintendent, the reality of 
education is found in the personal and face-to- 
face contact of teacher and child. The con- 
ditions that underlie and regulate this contact 
dominate the educational situation. 

In this contact, and in it alone, can the 
reality of current education be got at. To get 
away from it is to be ignorant and to deceive 
ourselves. It is in this contact that the real 
course of study, whatever be laid down on 
paper, is actually found. Now, the conditions 
that determine this personal contact of child 
with child, and of children with teacher are, 
upon the whole, the survival of the period 
when the domination of the three R's was 
practically unquestioned. Their effectiveness 
lies in their adaptation to realizing the ends 
and aims of that form of education. They do 
not lend themselves to realizing the purposes 
of the newer studies. Consequently we do not 
get the full benefit either of the old or of the 



24 The Educational Situation 

new studies. They work at cross purposes. 
The excellence which the conditions would 
possess if they were directed solely at securing 
progress in reading, writing, and arithmetic, 
and allied topics, is lost because of the intro- 
duction of material irrelevant and distracting 
from the standpoint of the co?iditions. The new 
studies do not have an opportunity to show 
what they can do, because they are hampered 
by machinery constructed for turning out an- 
other kind of goods; they are not provided 
with their own distinctive set of agencies. 
Granted this contradiction, the only wonder is 
that the chaos is not greater than it actually 
is ; the only wonder is that we are securing 
such positive results as actually come about. 

Let us study this contradiction somewhat 
more intimately, taking up one by one some 
of its constituent elements. On the side of 
the machinery of school-work I mention first 
the number of children in a room. This runs 
in the graded schools of our country anywhere 
from thirty-five to sixty. This can hardly be 
said to be an ideal condition, even from the 
standpoint of uniform progress in reading, 
writing, and arithmetic, and the symbols of 
geography and history ; but it certainly is 
indefinitely better adapted to securing these 
results than that of the symmetrical and com- 



The Educational Sittiation 25 

plete development of all the powers, physical, 
mental, moral, aesthetic, of each individual 
child out of the entire fifty. From the stand- 
point of the latter aim, the discrepancj^ is so 
great that the situation is either ridiculous or 
tragic. Under such circumstances, how do we 
have the face to continue to speak at all of the 
complete development of the individual as the 
supreme end of educational effort ? Except- 
ing here and there with the genius who seems 
to rise above all conditions, the school envi- 
ronment and machinery almost compel the 
more mechanical features of school-work to 
lord it over the more vital aims. 

We get the same result when we consider, 
not the number of children in a given grade, 
but the arrangement of grades. The distribu- 
tion into separate years, each with its own 
distinctive and definite amount of ground to 
be covered, the assignment of one and only 
one teacher to a grade, the confinement of the 
same teacher to the same grade year by 
year, save as she is " promoted " to a higher 
grade, introduce an isolation which is fatal, I 
will not say to good work, but to the effective 
domination of the ideal of continuous devel- 
opment of character and personal powers. 
The unity and wholeness of the child's devel- 
opment can be realized only in a correspond- 



2 6 The Educational Situation 

ing unity and continuity of school conditions. 
Anything that breaks the latter up into frac- 
tions, into isolated parts, must have the same 
influence upon the educative growth of the 
child.^ 

It may, however, be admitted that these 
conditions, while highly important as regards 
the aims of education, have little or nothing 
to do with the course of study — with the 
subject-matter of instruction. But a little 
reflection will show that the material of study 
is profoundly affected. The conditions which 
compel the children to be dealt with en masse^ 
which compel them to be led in flocks, if not in 
hordes, make it necessary to give the stress of 
attention to those studies in which some sort of 
definite result can be most successfully attained, 
without much appeal to individual initiative, 
judgment, or inquiry. Almost of necessity, 
attention to the newer studies whose value is 
dependent upon perso-nal appropriation, assimi- 
lation and expression is incidental and super- 
ficial. The results with the latter are naturally 
often so unsatisfactory that they are held 
responsible for the evil consequences; we fail 
to trace the matter back to the conditions 
which control the result reached. Upon the 

' This thought is developed in the first number of this 
series : Isolation in the Schooly especially pp. 33-40 ; 92-98. 



The Educational Situation 27 

whole, it is testimony to the vitality of these 
studies that in such a situation the results are 
not worse than they actually are. 

Unless the teacher has opportunity and occa- 
sion to study the educative process as a whole, 
not as divided into eight or twelve or sixteen 
parts, it is impossible to see how he can deal 
effectively with the problem of the complete 
development of the child. The restriction of 
outlook to one limited year of the child's 
growth will inevitably tend in one of two 
directions : either the teacher's work becomes 
mechanical, because practically limited to cov- 
ering the work assigned for the year, irrespec- 
tive of its nutritive value in the child's growth ; 
or else local and transitory phases of the 
child's development are seized upon — phases 
which too often go by the name of the inter- 
ests of the child — and these are exaggerated 
out of all due bounds. Since the newer studies 
give most help in making this excessive and 
sensational appeal, these studies are held 
responsible for the evils that subsequently 
show themselves. As a matter of fact, the 
cause of the difficulty lies in the isolation and 
restriction of the work of the teacher which 
practically forbids his considering the signifi- 
cance of art, music, and nature study in the 
light of continuity and completeness of growth. 



28 The Educational Sitaation 

This unity and completeness must, however, 
be cared for somehow. Since not provided 
for on the basis of the teacher's knowledge of 
the whole process of which his own work is 
one organic member, it is taken care of through 
external provision of a consecutive course of 
study, external supervision, and the mechanics 
of examination and promotion. Connection 
must somehow be made between the various 
fractional parts — the successive grades. The 
supervisor, the principal, is the recourse. Act- 
ing, however, not through the medium of the 
consciousness of the class-room teacher, but 
through the medium of prescription of mode 
of action, the inevitable tendency is to arrest 
attention upon those parts of the subject-matter 
which lend themselves to external assignment 
and conjunction. Even music, drawing, and 
manual training are profoundly influenced by 
this fact. Their own vital aims and spirit are 
compromised, or even surrendered, to the 
necessities for laying out a course of study in 
such a manner that one year's work may fit 
externally into that of the next. Thus they 
part with much of their own distinctive and 
characteristic value, and become, to a consid- 
erable extent, simple additions to the num- 
ber of routine studies carried by children and 
teacher. They serve no new purpose of their 



The Educational Situation 29 

own, but add to the burden of the old. It is 
no wonder that, when the burden gets too 
great, there is demand that they be lopped 
off as excrescences upon the educational sys- 
tem. 

The matter of promotion from grade to 
grade has a precisely similar effect upon the 
course of study. It is from the standpoint of 
the child, just what the isolation and external 
combination already alluded to are from the 
side of the teacher. The things of the spirit 
do not lend themselves easily to that kind of 
external inspection which goes by the name 
of examination. They do not lend themselves 
easily to exact quantitative measurement. 
Technical proficiency, acquisition of skill and 
information, present much less difficulty. So 
again emphasis is thrown upon those tradi- 
tional subjects of the school curriculum which 
permit most readily a mechanical treatment 
— upon the three R's and upon the facts of 
external classification in history and science, 
matters of formal technique in music, drawing, 
and manual training. Continuity, order, must 
be somewhat maintained — if not the order 
and method of the spirit, then at least that of 
external conditions. Nothing is gained by 
throwing everything into chaos. In this sense 
the conservative is thoroughly right when he 



30 The Educational Situation 

insists upon the maintenance of the established 
traditions of the school as regards the tests of 
the pupil's ability and preparation for pro- 
motion. He fails, however, to recognize the 
other alternative : that the looseness and con- 
fusion, the vagueness in accomplishment and 
in test of accomplishment of which he com- 
plains, may be due, not to the new studies 
themselves, but to the unfit conditions under 
which they operate. 

I have already alluded to the fact that at 
present the teacher is hardly enabled to get a 
glimpse of the educative process as a whole, 
and accordingly is reduced to adding together 
the various external bits into which that unity 
is broken. We get exactly the same result 
when we consider the way in which the course 
of study is determined. The fact that this is 
fixed by board of education, superintendent, or 
supervisor, by a power outside the teacher in 
the class room who alone can make that 
course of study a living reality, is a fact too 
obvious to be concealed. It is, however, 
comparatively easy to conceal from ourselves 
the tremendous import of this fact. As long 
as the teacher, who is after all the only real 
educator in the school system, has no definite 
and authoritative position in shaping the 
course of study, that is likely to remain an 



The Educational Situation 31 

external thing to be externally applied to the 
child.' 

A school board or a superintendent can lay 
out a course of study down to the point of 
stating exactly the number of pages of text- 
books to be covered in each year, each term 
and month of the year. It may prescribe the 
exact integers and fraction of integers with 
which the child shall make scholastic acquaint- 
ance during any period of 'his instruction ; it 
may directly or indirectly define the exact 
shapes to be reproduced in drawing, or men- 
tion the exact recipes to be followed in 
cooking. Doubtless the experience of the 
individual teacher who makes the connections 
between these things and the life of the child 
will receive incidental attention in laying out 
these courses. But, so long as the teacher 
has no definite voice, the attention will be 
only incidental ; and, as a further conse- 
quence, the average teacher will give only 
incidental study to the problems involved. 
If his work is the task of carrying out the 
instructions imposed upon him, then his time 
and thought must be absorbed in the matter 
of execution. There is no motive for interest, 
of a thoroughly vital and alert sort, in ques- 
tions of the intrinsic value of the subject- 

* See, again, Number I of this series, pp. 31-32 and 106-109. 



32 The Educational Situation 

matter and its adaptation to the needs of 
child growth. He may be called upon by 
official requirements, or the pressure of cir- 
cumstance, to be a student of pedagogical 
books and journals ; but conditions relieve 
him of the necessity of being a student of the 
most fundamental educational problems in 
their most urgent reality. 

The teacher needs to study the mechanics 
of successfully carrying into effect the pre- 
scribed matter of instruction ; he does not 
have to study that matter itself, or its educa- 
tive bearing. Needless to say, the effect of 
this upon the actual course of study is to 
emphasize the thought and time given to 
those subjects and phases of subjects where 
there is most promise of success in doing the 
exact things prescribed. The three R's are 
again magnified, while the technical and routine 
aspects of the newer studies tend to crowd 
out those elements that give them their deeper 
significance in intellectual and moral life. 
Since, however, the school must have relief 
from monotony, must have "interest," must 
have diversification and recreation, these stud- 
ies become too easily tools for introducing 
the excitement and amusement supposed to be 
necessary. The judicious observer who sees 
below the surface, but not to the foundation, 



The Educational Situation 33 

again discounts these studies. Meanwhile the 
actual efficiency of the three R's is hampered 
and lessened by the superaddition of the new 
ways of employing time, whether they be 
routine or exciting in character. 

It may easily be said that the class-room 
teacher at present is not sufficiently educated 
to be intrusted with any part in shaping a 
course of study. I waive the fundamen- 
tal question — the question of democracy — 
whether the needed education can be secured 
without giving more responsibility even to 
the comparatively uneducated. The objec- 
tion suggests another fundamental condition 
in our present school procedure — the question 
of the status of the teacher as regards selec- 
tion and appointment. 

The real course of study must come to the 
child from the teacher. What gets to the 
child is dependent upon what is in the mind 
and consciousness of the teacher, and upon the 
way it is in his mind. It is through the 
teacher that the value even of what is con- 
tained in the text-book is brought home to the 
child ; just in the degree in which the teacher's 
understanding of the material of the lessons is 
vital, adequate, and comprehensive, will 
that material come to the child in the same 
form ; in the degree in which the teacher's 



34 The Educational Situation 

understanding is mechanical, superficial and 
restricted, the child's appreciation will be 
correspondingly limited and perverted. If 
this be true, it is obviously futile to plan 
large expansions of the studies of the curricu- 
lum apart from the education of the teacher. 
I am far from denying the capacity on the part 
of truth above and beyond the comprehension 
of the teacher to filter through to the mind of 
an aspiring child ; but, upon the whole, it is 
certain beyond controversy that the success of 
the teacher in teaching, and of the pupil in 
learning, will depend upon the intellectual 
equipment of the teacher. 

To put literature into a course of study quite 
irrespective of the teacher's personal apprecia- 
tion of literary values — to say nothing of 
accurate discrimination as to the facts — is to 
go at the matter from the wrong end. To 
enact that at a given date all the grades of a 
certain city shall have nature study is to invite 
confusion and distraction. It would be comic 
(if it were not tragic) to suppose that all that 
is required to make music and drawing a part 
of the course of study is to have the school 
board legislate that a certain amount of the 
time of the pupil, covering a certain prescribed 
ground, shall be given to work with pencil and 
paper, and to musical exercises. There is no 



The Educational Situation 35 

magic by which these things can pass over 
from the printed page of the school manual to 
the child's consciousness. If the teacher has 
no standard of value in relation to them, no 
intimate personal reponse of feeling to them, 
no conception of the methods of art which 
alone bring the child to a corresponding intel- 
lectual and emotional attitude, these studies 
will remain what precisely they so often are — 
passing recreations, modes of showing off, or 
exercises in technique. 

The special teacher has arisen because of 
the recognition of the inadequate preparation 
of the average teacher to get the best results 
with these newer subjects. Special teaching, 
however, shifts rather than solves the problem. 
As already indicated, the question is a twofold 
one. It is a question, not only of what is 
known, but of how it is known. The special 
instructor in nature study or art may have a 
better command of the what — of the actual 
material to be taught — but be deficient in the 
consciousness of the relations borne by that 
particular subject to other forms of experience 
in the child, and, therefore, to his own personal 
growth. When this is the case we exchange 
King Log for King Stork. We exchange an 
ignorant and superficial teaching for a vigorous 
but one-sided, because over-specialized, mode 



3 6 The Educational Sitaation 

of instruction. The special teacher in manual 
training or what not, having no philosophy of 
education — having, that is, no view of the 
whole of which his own subject is a part — 
isolates that study and works it out wholly in 
terms of itself. His beginning and his end, as 
well as the intermediate materials and methods, 
fall within manual training. This may give 
technical facility, but it is not (save inciden- 
tally) education. 

This is not an attack upon special or depart- 
mental teaching. On the contrary, I have just 
pointed out that this mode of teaching has 
arisen absolutely in response to the demands 
of the situation. Since our present teachers 
are so largely an outcome of the older educa- 
tion, the so-called all-around teacher is for the 
most part a myth. Moreover, it is a mistake 
to suppose that we can secure the all-around 
teacher merely by instructing him in a larger 
number of branches. In the first place, human 
capacity is limited. The person whose interests 
and powers are all-around is not as a rule 
teaching in grade schools. He is at the head 
of the great scientific, industrial, and political 
enterprises of civilization. But granted that 
the average teacher could master ten distinct 
studies as well as five, it still remains true that 
without intellectual organization, without defi- 



The Educational Sittiation 37 

nite insight into the relation of these studies 
to one another and to the whole of life, with- 
out ability to present them to the child from 
the standpoint of such insight, we simply add 
an overburdened and confused teacher to the 
overburdened and confused child. In a word, 
to make the teaching in the newer studies 
thoroughly effective, whether by specialists or 
by the all-around teacher, there must, in addi- 
tion to knowledge of the particular branch, be 
sanity, steadiness, and system in the mental 
attitude of the instructor. It is folly to sup- 
pose that we can carry on the education of the 
child apart from the education of the teacher. 
If I were to touch upon certain other matters 
fundamentally connected with the problem of 
securing the teachers who make the nominal 
course of study a reality, I should be started 
upon an almost endless road. However, we 
must not pass on without at least noticing that 
the question is one of political, as well as of 
intellectual organization. An adequate view 
of the whole situation would take into account 
the general social condition upon which de- 
pends the actual supplying of teachers to the 
schoolroom. The education of the candidate, 
of the would-be teacher, might be precisely 
that outlined above, and yet it would remain, 
to a large extent, inoperative, if the appoint- 



3^ The Educational Situation 

ment of school-teachers was at the mercy of 
personal intrigue, political bargaining, and the 
effort of some individual or class to get power 
in the community through manipulation of 
patronage. It is sentimental to suppose that 
any large and decisive reform in the course of 
study can take place as long as such agencies 
influence what actually comes in a living way 
to the life of the child. 

Nor in a more comprehensive view could we 
be entirely silent upon the need of commercial as 
well as political reform. Publishing companies 
affect not only the text-books and appara- 
tus, the garb with which the curriculum clothes 
itself, but also and that directly the course 
of study itself. New studies are introduced 
because some pushing firm, by a happy coin- 
cidence, has exactly the books which are 
needed to make that study successful. Old 
studies which should be entirely displaced (if 
there be any logic in the introduction of the 
new one) are retained because there is a vested 
interest behind them. Happy is the large 
school system which is free from the conges- 
tion and distraction arising from just such 
causes as these. And yet there are those who 
discuss the relative merits of what they are 
pleased to call old and new education as if it 
were purely an abstract and intellectual matter. 



The Educational Situation 39 



But we cannot enter upon these larger 
phases. It is enough if we recognize the typical 
signs indicating the impossibility of separating 
either the theoretical discussion of the course 
of study or the problem of its practical 
efficiency from intellectual and social con- 
ditions which at first sight are far removed ; it is 
enough if we recognize that the question of 
the course of study is a question in the organi- 
zation of knowledge, in the organization of 
life, in the organization of society. And, for 
more immediate purposes, it is enough to rec- 
ognize that certain conditions imbedded in 
the present scheme of school administration 
affect so profoundly results reached by the 
newer studies, by manual training, art and 
nature study, that it is absurd to discuss the 
the value or lack of value of the latter, without 
taking these considerations into account. I 
recur to my original proposition : that these 
studies are not having their own career, are not 
exhibiting their own powers, but are hampered 
and compromised by a school of machinery 
originated and developed with reference to 
quite different ends and aims. The real conflict 
is not between a certain group of studies, the 
three R's, those having to do with the symbols 
and tools of intellectual life, and other studies 
representing the personal development of the 



40 The Edwcational Situation 

chilcf, but between our professed ends and the 
means we are using to realize these ends. 

The popular assumption, however, is to the 
contrary. It is still the common belief (and 
not merely in popular thought, but among 
those who profess to speak with authority) 
that the two groups of studies are definitely 
opposed to each other in their aims and meth- 
ods, in the mental attitude demanded from 
the child, in the kind of work called for from 
the instructor. It is assumed that we have a 
conflict between one group of studies dealing 
only with the forms and symbols of knowl- 
edge, studies to be mastered by mechanical 
drill, and between those that appeal to the 
vital concerns of child life and afford present 
satisfaction. This assumed opposition has 
been so clearly stated in a recent educational 
document that I may be pardoned quoting at 
length : 

In regard to education we may divide the facirities 
into two classes — the doing faculties and the thinking 
faculties. By the doing faculties I mean those me- 
chanical habits which are essential to the acquisition of 
knowledge, and are pure arts, such as the art of read- 
ing; that of performing arithmetical operations with 
rapidity and correctness ; that of expressing thoughts in 
legible characters, and in words of grammatical ar- 
rangement. These arts can only be acquired by labo- 
rious drilling on the part of the teacher, and labor on 



The Educational Situation 41 

the part of the pupil. They require little instruction, 
but repetition until they are performed with ease and 
almost pleasure. To neglect to impart these habits is 
to do a great injury to the child ; nothing should be 
substituted for them, though instruction in other 
branches which require more thought and less art may 
be mingled as recreations with them. 

I have never seen so condensed and com- 
prehensive a statement of the incompatibility 
of aims and method for both teacher and pupil 
as is given here. On one side we have "doing 
faculties," by which is meant powers of pure 
external efficiency. These find their expression 
in what are termed "arts," which is interpreted 
to mean purely mechanical habits — sheer 
routine facility. These are acquired by con- 
tinued drill on the, part of the teacher, and 
continued laborious repetition on the part of 
the child. Thought is not required in the 
process, nor is the result "instruction" — that 
is, a real building up of the mind; the outcome 
is simply command of powers, of value not in 
themselves, but as tools of further knowledge, 
as "essential to the acquisition of knowledge." 
The scheme of contrasting studies is not so 
well developed. It is made clear, however, 
that they appeal to thought, not to mechanical 
habits, and that they proceed by instruction, 
not by drill. It is further implied that their 



42 The Educational Situation 

exercise is attended not so much with labor as 
with pleasure on the part of the child — which 
may be interpreted to mean that they have a 
present value in the life of the child, and are 
not mere instrumentalities of remoter acquisi- 
tion. The situation as regards school work 
is contained in the proposition that the me- 
chanical facilities based upon sheer drill and 
laborious repetition must make up the bulk of 
the elementary education, while the studies 
which involve thought, the furnishing of the 
mind itself, and result in a direct expansion of 
life, "may be mingled as recreations." They 
may be permitted, in other words, in the 
schoolroom as an occasional relief from the 
laborious drill of the more important studies. 
Here is the dividing wall. The wall has 
been somewhat undermined ; breaches have 
been worn in it ; it has, as it were, been bodily 
pushed along until the studies of thought, of 
instruction and of present satisfaction occupy 
a greater bulk of school time and work. But 
the wall is still there. The mechanical habits 
that are essential to the acquisition of knowl- 
edge, the art of reading, of performing arith- 
metical operations and of expressing thought 
legibly and grammatically, are still the serious 
business of the schoolroom. Nature study, 
manual training, music, and art are incidents 



The Educational Situation 43 

introduced because of the "interests" they 
provide, because they appeal to ability to think, 
arouse general intelligence, and add to the 
fund of information. A house divided against 
itself cannot stand. If the results of our pres- 
ent system are not altogether and always sat- 
isfactory, shall we engage in crimination and 
recrimination — setting the old studies against 
the new and the new against the old — or 
shall we hold responsible the organization, or 
lack of organization, intellectual and adminis 
trative, in the school system itself? If the 
old bottles will not hold the new wine, it is 
conceivable that we should blame neither the 
bottles nor the wine, but conditions which 
have brought the two into mechanical and 
external connection. 

If my remarks in dwelling upon the split 
and contradiction in the present situation ap- 
pear to be unnecessarily gloomy, it should be 
remembered that this view is optimism itself 
as compared with the theory which holds that 
the two groups of studies are radically op- 
posed to each other in their ends, results, and 
methods. Such a theory holds that there is a 
fundamental contradiction between the present 
and the future needs of the child, between 
what his life requires as immediate nutritive 
material and what it needs as preparation for 



44 The Educational Situation 

the future. It assumes a fundamental conflict 
between that which nourishes the spirit of the 
child and that which affords the instrumen- 
talities of intellectual acquisition. It proclaims 
a fundamental opposition to exist in the mental 
activity between the methods of acquisition of 
skill, and the methods of development. The 
practical consequences are as disastrous as 
the logical split is complete. If the oppo- 
sition be an intrinsic one, then the present 
conflict and confusion in the school-room 
are permanent and not transitory. We shall 
be forever oscillating between extremes : now 
lending ourselves with enthusiasm to the 
introduction of art and music and manual 
training, because they give vitality to the 
school-work and relief to the child ; now queru- 
lously complaining of the evil results reached, 
and insisting with all positiveness upon the 
return of good old days when reading, writing, 
spelling, and arithmetic were adequately 
taught. Since by the theory there is no pos- 
sibility of an organic connection, of co-opera- 
tive relation, between the two types of study, 
the relative position of each in the curriculum 
must be decided from arbitrary and external 
grounds ; by the wish and zeal of some strong 
man, or by the pressure of temporary popular 
sentiment. At the best we get only a com- 



The Educational Situation 45 

promise ; at the worst we get a maximum of 
routine with a halo of sentiment thrown about 
it, or a great wish-wash of superficiality cover- 
ing up the residuum of grind. 

As compared with such a view, the concep- 
tion that the conflict is not inherent in the 
studies themselves, but arises from maladjust- 
ment of school conditions, from survival of a 
mode of educational administration calculated 
for different ends from those now confront- 
ing us, is encouragement itself. The prob- 
lem becomes first an intellectual and then a 
practical one. Intellectually what is needed 
is a philosophy of organization ; a view of 
the organic unity of the educative process 
and educative material, and of the place 
occupied in this whole by each of its own 
parts. We need to know just what reading 
and writing and nurnber do for the present 
life of the child, and how they do it. We 
need to know what the method of mind is 
which underlies subject-matter in cooking, 
shop-work and nature study, so that they 
may become effective for discipline, and not 
mere sources of present satisfaction and mere 
agencies of relief — so that they too may be- 
come as definitely modes of effective prepara- 
tion for the needs of society as ever reading, 
writing, and arithmetic have been. 



46 The Educational Situation 

With our minds possessed by a sane and 
coherent view of the whole situation, we may 
attempt such a gradual, yet positive modifica- 
tion of existing procedure as will enable us 
to turn theory into practice. Let us not be 
too precipitate, however, in demanding light 
upon just what to do next. We should re- 
member that there are times when the most 
practical thing is to face the intellectual prob- 
lem, and to get a clear and comprehensive 
survey of the theoretical factors involved. The 
existing situation, with all its vagueness and 
all its confusion, will nevertheless indicate 
plenty of points of leverage, plenty of intelli- 
gent ways of straightening things out, to one 
who approaches it with any clear conviction 
of the ends he wishes to reach, and of the 
obstacles in the way. An enlightenment of 
vision is the prerequisite of efficiency in con- 
duct. The conservative may devote himself 
to the place of reading and writing and arith- 
metic in the curriculum so that they shall 
vitally connect with the present needs of the 
child's life, and afford the satisfaction that 
always comes with the fulfilment, the expres- 
sion, of present power. The reformer may 
attack the problem, not at large and all over 
the entire field, but at the most promising 
point, whether it be art or manual training or 



The Educational Situation 47 

nature study, and concentrate all his efforts 
upon educating alike the community, the 
teacher and the child into the knowledge of 
fundamental values for individual mind and 
for community life embodied in that study. 
Both conservative and reformer can devote 
themselves to the problem of the better edu- 
cation of the teacher, and of doing away with 
the hindrances to placing the right teacher 
in the schoolroom ; and to the hindrances 
to continued growth after he is placed there. 
The American people believe in education 
above all else, and when the educators have 
come to some agreement as to what education 
is, the community will not be slow in placing 
at their disposal the equipment and resources 
necessary to make their ideal a reality. 

In closing let me say that I have intention- 
ally emphasized the obstacles to further prog- 
ress, rather than congratulated ourselves upon 
the progress already made. The anomaly and 
confusion have, after all, been of some use. 
In some respects the blind conflict of the last 
two generations of educational history has 
been a better way of changing the conditions 
than would have been some wholesale and a 
priori rearrangement. The forms of genuine 
growth always come slowly. The struggle of 
the newer studies to get a foothold in the cur- 



4^ The Educational Situation 

riculum, with all the attendant confusion, is 
an experiment carried out on a large scale ; an 
experiment in natural selection, of the survival 
of the fit in educational forms. 

Yet there must come a time when blind ex- 
perimentation is to give way to something 
more directed. The struggle should bring out 
the factors in the problem so that we can go 
more intelligently to work in its solution. 
The period of blind striving, of empirical ad- 
justment, trying now this and now that, mak- 
ing this or that combination because it is 
feasible for the time being, of advancing here 
and retreating there, of giving headway now 
to the instinct of progress and now to the 
habit of inertia, should find an outcome in 
some illumination of vision, in some clearer 
revelation of the realities of the situation. It 
is uneconomical to prolong the period of con- 
flict between incompatible tendencies. It 
makes for intellectual hypocrisy to suppose 
that we are doing what we are not doing. 
It weakens the nerve of judgment and the 
fiber of action to submit to conditions which 
prevent the realization of aims to which we 
profess ourselves to be devoted. 

My topic is the elementary educational 
situation. In a somewhat more limited and 
precise view than I have previously taken of 



The Educational Situation 49 

the situation, I believe we are now nearing 
the close of the time of tentative, blind, em- 
pirical experimentation ; that we are close to 
the opportunity of planning our work on the 
basis of a coherent philosophy of experience 
and a philosophy of the relation of school 
studies to that experience ; that we can ac- 
cordingly take up steadily and wisely the effort 
of changing school conditions so as to make 
real the aims that command the assent of our 
intelligence and the support of our moral en- 
thusiasm. 



II. AS CONCERNS SECONDARY 
EDUCATION. 

I SHOULD feel hesitant indeed to come be- 
fore a body of teachers, engaged in the prac- 
tical work of teaching, and appear to instruct 
them regarding the solution of the difficult 
problems which face them. My task is a more 
grateful one. It is mine simply to formulate 
and arrange the difficulties which the current 
state of discussion shows teachers already to 
have felt. Those concerned with secondary 
school work have realized that their energies 
must be peculiarly concentrated at certain 
points ; they have found that some problems 
are so urgent that they must be met and 
wrestled with. I have tried in the accompany- 
ing syllabus to gather together these practical 
problems and to arrange them in such form as 
to show their connections with one another; 
and by this classification to indicate what 
seemed to me the roots of the difficulty. 

I. Problems relating to the articulation of the secondary 
school in the educational systetn. 

I. Adjustment to the grades. 

a) Dropping out of pupils : extent and causes. 

b) Different sorts of preparation of teachers ; methods 
of rectifying, etc. 

50 



The Educational Situation 5^ 

c) Abrupt change of ideals and methods of teaching 
and discipline. 

d) Introduction of traditional high- school studies into 
the upper grades ; the science course, etc. 

2. Adjustment to college. 

a) Modes of entering college ; examination, certifica- 
tion, etc. 
d) Varieties of entrance requirements. 

c) Different problems of public and private high 
schools. 

d) Coaching for specific results vs. training and 
method. 

II. Problems relating to the adjustment of preparation for 
college to preparation for other pursuits in life. 

1. Is it true that the same education gives the best 
preparation for both ? 

2. If so, which shall be taken as the standard for meas- 
uring the character of the other ? 

3. If not so, by w^hat principles and along what lines 
shall the work be differentiated? 

4. If not so, shall specialized or definite preparation be 
made for other future callings as well as for the col- 
lege student ? 

III. The adjust?nent of work to the individual. 

1. The nature and limits of the elective principle as 
applied to particular subjects, and to courses and 
groups of subjects. 

2. Acquaintance with the history, environment, and 
capacity of individuals with reference to assisting in 
the selection of vocation. 

3. Does the period of adolescence present such peculiari- 
ties as to call for marked modifications of present 
secondary work ? 



52 The Educational Situation 

IV. Problems arising from social phases of secondary -school 
work. 

1. The educational utilization of social organizations : 
debating, musical, dramatic clubs ; athletics. 

2. School discipline and government in their social 
aspects. 

3. Relations to the community : the school as a social 
center. 

V. Preceding problems as affecting the curriculum: conflict 
of studies and groups of studies. 

1. The older problem : adjustment of the respective 
claims of ancient and modern languages, of language 
and science, of history and social science, civics, 
economics, etc., of English literature and composi- 
tion. 

2. The newer problem : 

a) The place of manual training and technological 
work. 

b) The place of fine art. 
f) Commercial studies. 

In what I have to say this morning, I shall 
make no attempt to go over these points one 
by one. I shall rather try to set clearly and 
briefly before you the reasons which have led 
me to adopt the classification presented. This 
will take me into a discussion of the historic 
and social facts which lie back of the prob- 
lems, and in the light of which alone I be- 
lieve these problems can be attacked and 
solved. If it seems unnecessarily remote to 
approach school problems through a presenta- 
tion of what may appear to be simply a form 



The Educational Situation 53 

of social philosophy, there is yet practical en- 
couragement in recognizing that exactly the 
same forces which have thrust these questions 
into the forefront of school practice, are also 
operative to solve them. For problems do 
not arise arbitrarily. They come from causes, 
and from causes which are imbedded in the 
very structure of the school system — yes, 
even beyond that, in the structure of society 
itself. It is for this reason that mere changes 
in the mechanics of the school system, wheth- 
er in administration or in the externals of sub- 
ject-matter, turn out mere temporary devices. 
Sometimes, when one has made a delicate or 
elaborate arrangement which seems to him 
exactly calculated to obviate the difficulties of 
the situation, one is tempted to accuse his 
generation as stiff-necked when the scheme 
does not take — -when it does not spread; 
when, in the language of the biologist, it is 
not selected. The explanation, however, is 
not in the hard-heartedness or intellectual 
blindness of others, but in the fact that any 
adjustment which really and permanently suc- 
ceeds within the school walls, must reach out 
and be an adjustment of forces in the social 
environment. 

A slight amount of social philosophy and 
social insight reveals two principles continu- 



54 The Educational Situation 

ously at work in all human institutions : one 
is toward specialization and consequent isola- 
tion, the other toward connection and interac- 
tion. In the life of the nation we see first a 
movement toward separation, toward marking 
off our own life as a people as definitely as 
possible to avoid its submergence, to secure 
for it an individuality of its own. Commer- 
cially we pursue a policy of protection ; in 
international relations one of having to do as 
little as possible with other nationalities. That 
tendency exhausts itself and the pendulum 
swings in another direction. Reciprocity, the 
broadening of our business life through in- 
creased contacts and wider exchange, becomes 
the commercial watchword. Expansion, tak- 
ing our place in the sisterhood of nations, 
making ourselves recognized as a world-power, 
becomes the formula for international politics. 
Science shows the same rhythm in its develop- 
ment. A period of specialization — of relative 
isolation — secures to each set of natural phe- 
nomena a chance to develop on its own ac- 
count, without being lost in, or obscured by 
generalities or a mass of details. But the time 
comes when the limit of movement in this 
direction is reached, and it is necessary to 
devote ourselves to tracing the threads of 
connection which unite the different special- 



The Educational Situation 55 

ized branches into a coherent and consecutive 
whole. At present the most active sciences 
seem to be spelled with a hyphen ; it is astro- 
physics, stereo-chemistry, psycho-physics, and 
so on. 

This is not a movement of blind action 
and reaction. One tendency is the necessary 
completion of the other. A certain degree of 
isolation of detachment is required to secure 
the unhindered and mature development of 
any group of forces. It is necessary in order 
to master them in their practical workings. 
We have to divide to conquer. But when the 
proper degree of individualization is reached, 
we need to bring one thing to bear upon 
another in order to realize upon the benefits 
which may be derived from the period of iso- 
lation. The sole object of the separation is to 
serve as a means to the end of more effective 
interaction. 

Now as to the bearings of this abstract 
piece of philosophy upon our school prob- 
lems. The school system is a historic evo- 
lution. It has a tradition and a movement 
of its own. Its roots run back into the past 
and may be traced through the strata of the 
successive centuries. It has an independence, 
a dignity of its own comparable to that of any 
other institution. In this twenty-five-hundred- 



56 The Educational Situation 

year-old development it has, of necessity, 
taken on its individuality at the expense of a 
certain isolation. Only through this isolation 
has it been disentangled from absorption in 
other institutions : the family, government, the 
church, and so on. This detachment has been 
a necessity in order that it might become a 
true division of labor and thus perform most 
efficiently the service required of it. 

But there are disadvantages as well as ad- 
vantages. Attention has come to be concen- 
trated upon the affairs of the school system as 
if they concerned simply the system itself, and 
had only a very indirect reference to other 
social institutions. The school-teacher often 
resents reference to outside contacts and con- 
siderations as if they were indeed outside — 
simply interferences. There can be no doubt 
that in the last two centuries much more 
thought and energy have been devoted to 
shaping the school system into an effective 
mechanism within itself than to securing its 
due interaction with family life, the church, 
commerce, or political institutions. 

But, having secured this fairly adequate and 
efficient machine, the question which is coming 
more and more to the front is : what shall we 
do with it? How shall we secure from it the 
services, the fruits, which alone justify the 



The Educational Situation 57 

expense of money, time, and thought in build- 
ing up the machine ? 

It is at this point that particular conflicts 
and problems begin to show themselves. The 
contemporary demands — the demands that 
are made in the attempt to secure the proper 
interaction of the school — are one thing; the 
demands that arise out of the working of the 
school system considered as an independent 
historical institution are another. Every 
teacher has to work at detailed problems which 
arise out of this conflict, whether he is aware 
of its existence or not, and is he harassed by 
friction that arises in the conflict of these two 
great social forces. Men divide along these 
lines. We find one group instinctively rather 
than consciously ranging themselves about 
the maintenance of the existing school system, 
and holding that reforms are to be made along 
the line of improvement in its present work- 
ings. Others are clamorous for more radical 
changes — the changes which will better adapt 
the school to contemporary social needs. 
Needless to say, each represents a necessary 
and essential factor in the situation, because 
each stands for the working of a force which 
cannot be eliminated. 

Let me now try to shov/ how, out of this 
profound social conflict and necessity of social 



5^ The Educational Situation 

adjustment, the particular problems arise which 
I have arranged under five heads in the accom- 
panying syllabus. Our first concern is with 
the articulation of the high school into the 
entire educational system. The high school 
looks towards the grades on one side and 
toward the college on the other. What are 
the historic influences which have shaped this 
intermediate position, and placed peculiar dif- 
ficulties and responsibilities upon the sec- 
ondary school ? Briefly put, it is that the 
elementary school and the college represent 
distinctly different forces and traditions on 
the historic side. The elementary school is an 
outgrowth of the democratic movement in its 
ethical aspects. Prior to the latter half of the 
eighteenth century the elementary school was 
hardly more than a wooden device for instruct- 
ing little children of the lower classes in some 
of the utilities of their future callings — the 
mere rudiments of reading, writing, and num- 
ber. The democratic upheaval took shape 
not merely in a demand for political equality, 
but in a more profound aspiration towards an 
equality of intellectual and moral opportunity 
and development. The significance of such an 
educational writer as Rousseau is not measured 
by any particular improvement he suggested, 
or by any particular extravagances he indulged 



The Educational Situation 59 

himself in. His is a voice struggling to ex- 
press the necessity of a thoroughgoing revo- 
lution of elementary education to make it a 
factor in the intellectual and moral develop- 
ment of all — not a mere device for teaching 
the use of certain practical tools to those sec- 
tions of society before whose development a 
stone wall was placed. What Rousseau as a 
writer was to the emotions of the France of 
his day, Horace Mann as a doer was to the 
practical situation of the United States in his 
time. He stood, and stood most effectively, 
for letting the democratic spirit, in all of its 
ethical significance, into the common elemen- 
tary schools, and for such a complete reor- 
ganization of these schools as would make 
them the most serviceable possible instru- 
ments of human development. 

In spite of all the influences which are con- 
tinually operative to limit the scope and range 
of elementary education, in spite of the in- 
fluences which would bring back a reversion 
to the type of the limited utilitarian school 
of the seventeenth century, that part of the 
school system which stands underneath the 
high school represents this broad democratic 
movement. To a certain extent, and in many 
of its phases, the high school is an outgrowth 
of exactly the same impulse. It has the same 



6o The Educational Situation 

history and stands for the same ideals; but 
only in part. It has also been profoundly 
shaped by influences having another origin. 
It represents also the tradition of the learned 
class. It maintains the tradition of higher 
culture, as a distinct possession of a certain 
class of society. It embodies the aristocratic 
ideal. If we cast our eyes back over history, 
we do not find its full meaning summed up 
in the democratic movement of which I have 
just spoken. We find the culture of the ancient 
world coming down to us by a distinct channel. 
We find the wisdom and enlightenment of the 
past conserved and handed on by a distinct 
class located almost entirely in the colleges, 
and in the higher academies which are to 
all intents and purposes the outgrowth of the 
colleges. ' We find that our high school has 
been quite as persistently molded and directed 
through the agencies which have been con- 
cerned with keeping alive and passing on the 
treasure of learning, as through the democratic 
influences which have surged up from below. 
The existing high school, in a word, is a prod- 
uct of the meeting of these two forces, and 
upon it more than upon any other part of the 
school system is placed the responsibility of 
making an adjustment. 

I do not mention the tradition of learning 



The Educational Situation 6i 

kept up in the universities of the Middle Ages 
and the higher schools of the Renaissance, and 
refer to it as aristocratic for the sake of dis- 
paraging it. Eternal vigilance is the price of 
liberty, and eternal care and nurture are the 
price of maintaining the precious conquest of 
the past — of preventing a relapse into Philis- 
tinism, that combination of superficial enlight- 
enment and dogmatic crudity. If it were not 
for the work of an aristocracy in the past, 
there would be but little worth conferring upon 
the democracy of today. 

There are not in reality two problems of 
articulation for the high school — one as re- 
gards the grades and the other as regards the 
college. There is at bottom but one problem 
— that of adjusting the demand for an ade- 
quate training of the masses of mankind to 
the conservation and use of that higher learn- 
ing which is the primary and essential con- 
cern of a smaller number — of a minority. Of 
course, elementary school and college alike 
are effected by the same problem. Part of 
the work of the grades today is precisely the 
enrichment of its traditional meager and mate- 
rialistic curriculum with something of that 
spirit and wealth of intelligence that are the 
product of the higher schools. And one of 
the problems of the college is precisely to 



62 The Educational Sittiation 

make its store of learning more available to 
the masses, make it count for more in the 
everyday life. 

But the high school is the connecting link, 
and it must bear the brunt. Unless I am a false 
prophet, we shall soon see the same thoughtful 
attention which for the past fifteen years has 
characterized discussion of the relation of 
high school and college, speedily transfer- 
ring itself over to the problem of a more or- 
ganic and vital relation between the high 
school and the grades. The solution of this 
problem is important in order that the demo- 
cratic movement may not be abortively 
arrested — in order that it may have its full 
sweep. But it is equally important, for the 
sake of the college, and in the interests of 
higher learning. The arbitrary hiatus which 
exists at present reacts as unfavorably in one 
direction as in the other. 

First, it limits the constituency of the col- 
lege ; it lessens the actual numbers of those 
who are awakened to the opportunities before 
them, and directed towards the college doors. 
Secondly, it restricts the sphere of those who 
sympathetically and vicariously feel the influ- 
ence of the college, and are thus led to feel 
that what concerns the welfare of the college 
is of direct concern to them. The attitude of 



The Educational Situation 63 

the mass of the people today towards the col- 
lege is one of curiosity displaying itself from 
afar rather than of immediate interest. In- 
deed, it sometimes would seem that only ath- 
letic exhibitions form a direct line of con- 
nection between the college and the average 
community life. In the third place it tends to 
erect dams which prevent the stream of teach- 
ers flowing from the college walls from seek- 
ing or finding congenial service in the grades, 
and thereby tends automatically to perpetuate 
whatever narrowness of horizon or paucity of 
resource is characteristic of the elementary 
school. Fourth, it operates to isolate the col- 
lege in its working relations to life, and thereby 
to hmder it from rendering its normal service 
to society. 

I pass on now to the second main line of 
problems — those having to do with prepara- 
tion for college on one side, and for life on the 
other. Ultimately this is not a different prob- 
lem, but simply another outgrowth of the same 
question. A few years ago a happy formula 
was current: the proposition that the best prep- 
aration for college was also the best prepara- 
tion for life. The formula was such a happy 
one that if formulae ever really disposed of any 
practical difficulty, there would be no longer 
any problem to discuss. But I seem to ob* 



64 The Educational Sittiation 

serve that this proposition is not heard so fre- 
quently as formerly; and indeed, that since it 
was uttered things seem to be taking their own 
course much as before. 

The inefficiency of the formula lies in its am- 
biguity. It throws no light on the fundamen- 
tal problem of Which is Which ? Is it prepa- 
ration for college which sets the standard for 
preparation for life, or is it preparation for life 
which affords the proper criterion of adequate 
preparation for college ? Is the high-school 
course to be planned primarily with reference 
to meeting the needs of those who go to col- 
lege, on the assumption that this will also 
serve best the needs of those who go into 
other callings in life ? Or, shall the high 
school devote its energies to preparing all its 
members for life in more comprehensive sense, 
and permit the college to select its entrance 
requirements on the basis of work thus done ? 

I shall not attempt to solve this problem, 
and for a very good reason. I believe that 
there are forces inherent in the situation itself 
which are working out an inevitable solution. 
Every step in the more rational development 
of both high school and college, without any 
reference to their relationships to each other 
bring the two more closely together. I am 
optimistic enough to believe that we are much 



The Educational Situation 65 

nearer a solution of this vexed question than 
we generally dare believe. Quite independent 
of any question of entrance requirements, or of 
high-school preparation, the college is under- 
going a very marked development, and even 
transformation, on its own account. I refer to 
such developments within the college course 
as the introduction not only of the Ph. B. and 
B. S. courses side by side with the older clas- 
sical courses, but also to the forward move- 
ment in the direction of a specific group of 
commercial and social studies; and to the tend- 
ency of all universities of broad scope to main- 
tain technological schools. I refer also to the 
tendency to adapt the college work more and 
more to preparation for specific vocations in 
life. Practically all the larger colleges of the 
country now have a definite arrangement by 
which at least one year of the undergraduate 
course counts equally in the professional course 
of law, medicine, or divinity as the case may 
be. Now, when these two movements have 
reached their fruition, and the high school has 
worked out on its own account the broadening 
of its own curriculum, I believe we shall find 
that the high school and the college have ar- 
rived at a common point. The college course 
will be so broad and varied that it will be en- 
tirely feasible to take any judicious group of 



66 The Educational Situation 

studies from any well organized and well man- 
aged high school, and accept them as prepara- 
tion for college. It has been the narrowness of 
the traditional college curriculum on one side, 
and the inadequacy of the content of high- 
school work on the other, which have caused 
a large part of our mutual embarrassments. 

I must run rapidly over the problems 
referred to under my third and fourth main 
heads — those having to do with adjustment to 
individual needs, and to the social uses of the 
school. I take it that these illustrate just the 
same general principle we have been already dis- 
cussing. The school has a tradition not only 
regarding its position in the educational system 
as a whole, and not only as regards its proper 
curriculum, but also as regards the methods 
and ideals of discipline and administration in 
relation to its students. 

There can be no doubt that many of these 
traditions are out of alignment with the general 
trend of events outside the school walls — that 
in some cases the discrepancy is so great that 
the high-school tradition cuts abruptly across 
this outside stream. One of these influences 
is found in the tendency equally marked in the 
family, church, and state, to relax the bonds 
of purely external authority, to give more play 
to individual powers, to require of the indi- 



The Educational Situation 67 

vidual more personal initiative, and to ex- 
act of him a more personal accountability. 
There may be difference of opinion as to the 
degree in which the school should yield to 
this tendency, or should strive to counteract it, 
or should endeavor to utilize and direct it. 
There can be no difference of opinion, how- 
ever, as to the necessity of a more persistent 
and adequate study of the individual as regards 
his history, environment, predominant tastes 
and capacities, and special needs — and please 
note that I say needs as well as tastes. I do not 
think there can be any difference of opinion 
as to the necessity of a more careful study of 
the effect of particular school studies upon the 
normal growth of the individual, and of the 
means by which they shall be made a more 
effective means of connection between the 
present powers of the individual, and his future 
career. Just the limits of this principle, and 
its bearings upon such problems as the intro- 
duction of electives, I shall not take up. We 
have no time for a detailed discussion of these 
disputed points. As I have just indicated, 
however, I do not see how there can be dispute 
as to the fact that the individual has assumed 
such a position as to require more positive con- 
sideration and attention as an individual, and a 
correspondingly different mode of treatment. 



68 The Educational Situation 

I cannot leave the topic, however, without stat- 
ing that here also I believe the ultimate solu- 
tion will be found, not along the line of me- 
chanical devices as to election or non-election, 
but rather through the more continued and 
serious study of the individual in both his 
psychological make-up and his social relations. 
I have reserved the group of problems bear- 
ing upon the formation of a curriculum until 
the last. From the practical side, however, 
we probably find here the problems which 
confront the average teacher most urgently 
and persistently. This I take it is because all 
the other influences impinge at this point. 
The problem of just what time is to be given 
respectively to mathematics, and classics, and 
modern languages, and history, and English, 
and the sciences — physical, biological — is one 
the high-school teacher has always with him. 
To adjust the respective claims of the different 
studies and get a result which is at once har- 
monious and workable, is a task which almost 
defies human capacity. The problem, however, 
is not a separate problem. It is so pressing 
just because it is at this point that all the other 
forces meet. The adjustment of studies, and 
courses of study, is the ground upon which 
the practical solution and working adjustment 
of all other problems must be sought and 



The Educational Sittsation 69 

found. It is as an effect of other deep lying 
and far-reaching historic and social causes 
that the conflict of studies is to be treated. 

There is one matter constantly accompany- 
ing any practical problem which at first sight 
is extremely discouraging. Before we get 
our older problems worked out to any de- 
gree of satisfaction, new and greater prob- 
lems are upon us, threatening to overwhelm 
us. Such is the present educational situation. 
It would seem as if the question of adjust- 
ing the conflicts already referred to, which 
have so taxed the time and energy of high- 
school teachers for the past generation, were 
quite enough. But no ; before we have ar- 
rived at anything approaching consensus of 
opinion, the larger city schools at least find 
the conflict raging in a new spot — still other 
studies and lines of study are demanding rec- 
ognition. We have the uprearing of the com- 
mercial high school ; of the manual-training 
high school. 

At first the difificulty of the problem was 
avoided or evaded, because distinct and sepa- 
rate high schools were erected to meet these 
purposes. The current now seems to be in 
the other direction. A generation ago it was 
practically necessary to isolate the manual- 
training course of study in order that it 



yo The Educational Situation 

might receive due attention, and be worked 
out under fairly favorable influences. Fifteen 
years ago the same was essentially true of 
the commercial courses. Now, however, there 
are many signs of the times indicating that 
the situation is ripe for interaction — the 
problem is now the introduction of manual- 
training and commercial courses as integral 
and organic parts of a city high school. De- 
mands are also made for the introduction of 
more work in the line of fine art, drawing, 
music, and the application of design to indus- 
try; and for the introduction of a larger num- 
ber of specifically sociological studies — this 
independent of those studies which naturally 
form a part of the so-called commercial course. 
At first sight, as just intimated, the intro- 
duction of these new difficulties before we are 
half way through our old ones, is exceedingly 
distressing. But more than once the longest 
way around has proved the shortest way 
home. When new problems emerge, it must 
mean, after all, that certain essential condi- 
tions of the old problem had been ignored, 
and consequently that any solution reached 
simply in terms of the recognized factors 
would have been partial and temporary. I 
am inclined to think that in the present case 
the introduction of these new problems will 



The Edwcational Situation 7^ 

ultimately prove enlightening rather than con- 
fusing. They serve to generalize the older 
problems, and to make their factors stand out 
in clearer relief. 

In the future it is going to be less and less a 
matter of worrying over the respective merits of 
the ancient and modern languages ; or of the in- 
herent values of scientific vs. humanistic study, 
and more a question of discovering and ob- 
serving certain broader lines of cleavage, 
which affect equally the disposition and power 
of the individual, and the social callings for 
which education ought to prepare the individ- 
ual. It will be, in my judgment, less and less 
a question of piecing together certain studies 
in a more or less mechanical way in order to 
make out a so-called course of study running 
through a certain number of years ; and more 
and more a question of grouping studies to- 
gether according to their natural mutual affini- 
ties and reinforcements for the securing of 
certain well-marked ends. 

For this reason I welcome the introduction 
into the arena of discussion, of the question 
of providing courses in commerce and soci- 
ology, in the fine and applied arts, and in 
technological training. I think henceforth 
certain fundamental issues will stand out more 
clearly and have to be met upon a wider 



72 The Educational Sittsation 

basis and dealt with on a wider scale. As I 
see the matter, this change will require the 
concentration of attention upon these two 
points : first, what groups of studies will most 
serviceably recognize the typical divisions of 
labor, the typical callings in society, callings 
which are absolutely indispensable to the 
spiritual as well as to the material ends of 
society; and, secondly, not to do detriment 
to the real culture of the individual, or, if 
this seems too negative a statement, to se- 
cure for him the full use and control of his 
own powers. From this point of view, I think 
that certain of the problems just referred to, 
as, for instance, the conflict of language and 
science, will be put in a new perspective, will 
be capable of approach from a different angle ; 
and that because of this new approach many 
of the knotty problems which have embarrassed 
us in the past will disappear. 

Permit me to repeat in a somewhat more 
explicit way the benefits which I expect to 
flow from the expansion of the regular high 
school in making room for commercial, man- 
ual, and aesthetic studies. In the first place, it 
will provide for the recognition and the repre- 
sentation of all the typical occupations that 
are found in society. Thus it will make the 
working relationship between the secondary 



The Educational Situation 73 

school and life a free and all around one. It 
will complete the circuit — it will round out 
the present series of segmental arcs into a 
whole. Now this fact will put all the school 
studies in a new light. They can be looked at 
in the place they normally occupy in the whole 
circle of human activities. As long as social 
values and aims are only partially represented 
in the school, it is not possible to employ the 
standard of social value in a complete way. A 
continual angle of refraction and distortion is 
introduced in viewing existing studies, through 
the fact that they are looked at from an artifi- 
cial standpoint. Even those studies which are 
popularly regarded as preparing distinctively 
for life rather than for college cannot get 
their full meaning, cannot be judged correctly, 
until the life for which they are said to be a 
preparation receives a fuller and more bal- 
anced representation in the school. While, on 
the other hand, the more scholastic studies, if 
I may use the expression, cannot relate them- 
selves properly so long as the branches which 
give them their ultimate raison d'etre and 
sphere of application in the whole of life are 
non-existent in the curriculum. 

For a certain type of mind algebra and 
geometry are their own justification. They 
appeal to such students for the intellectual 



74 The Educational Situation 

satisfaction they supply, and as preparation 
for the play of the intellect in further studies. 
But to another type of mind these studies are 
relatively dead and meaningless until sur- 
rounded with a context of obvious bearings — 
such as furnished in manual-training studies. 
The latter, however, are rendered unduly utili- 
tarian and narrow when isolated. Just as in 
life the technological pursuits reach out and 
affect society on all sides, so in the school 
corresponding studies need to be imbedded 
in a broad and deep matrix. 

In the second place, as previously suggested, 
the explanation of the high school simplifies 
instead of complicates the college preparatory 
problem. This is because the college is going 
through an analogous evolution in the intro- 
duction of similar lines of work. It is ex- 
panding in technological and commercial 
directions. To be sure, the branch of fine and 
applied arts is still practically omitted ; it is 
left to the tender mercies of over-specialized 
and more or less mercenary institutions — 
schools where these things are taught more or 
less as trades, and for the sake of making 
money. But the same influences which have 
already rescued medical and commercial edu- 
tion from similar conditions, and have brought 
to bear upon them the wider outlook and more 



The Educational Situation 75 

expert method of the university, will in time 
make themselves also felt as regards the teach- 
ing of art. 

Thirdly, the wider high school relieves 
many of the difficulties in the adequate treat- 
ment of the individual as an individual. It 
brings the individual into a wider sphere of 
contacts, and thus makes it possible to test 
him and his capacity more thoroughly. It 
makes it possible to get at and remedy his 
weak points by balancing more evenly the 
influences that play upon him. In my judg- 
ment many of the problems now dealt with 
under the general head of election vs. pre- 
scription can be got at more correctly and 
handled more efficiently from the standpoint 
of the elastic vs. the rigid curriculum — and 
elasticity can be had only where there is 
breadth. The need is not so much an appeal 
to the untried and more or less capricious 
choice of the individual as for a region of 
opportunities large enough and balanced 
enough to meet the individual on his every 
side, and provide for him that which is neces- 
sary to arouse and direct. 

Finally, the objection usually urged to the 
broader high school is, when rightly consid- 
ered, the strongest argument for its existence. 
I mean the objection that the introduction of 



76 The Educational Situation 

manual training and commercial studies is a 
cowardly surrender on the part of liberal cul- 
ture of the training of the man as a man, to 
utilitarian demands for specialized adapta- 
tion to narrow callings. There is nothing in 
any one study or any one calling which makes 
it in and of itself low or meanly practical. It 
is all a question of its isolation or of its setting. 
It is not the mere syntactical structure or ety- 
mological content of the Latin language which 
has made it for centuries such an unrivaled 
educational instrument. There are dialects 
of semi-barbarous tribes which in intricacy 
of sentential structure and delicacy of rela- 
tionship, are quite equal to Latin in this 
respect. It is the context of the Latin lan- 
guage, the wealth of association and sugges- 
tion belonging to it from its position in the 
history of human civilization that freight it 
with such meaning. 

Now the callings that are represented by 
manual training and commercial studies are 
absolutely indispensable to human life. They 
afford the most permanent and persistent 
occupations of the great majority of human 
kind. They present man with his most per- 
plexing problems ; they stimulate him to the 
most strenuous putting forth of effort. To 
indict a whole nation were a grateful task 



The Educational Sittiation 77 

compared with labeling such occupations as 
low or narrow — lacking in all that makes for 
training and culture. The professed and pro- 
fessional representative of "culture" may well 
hesitate to cast the first stone. It may be 
that it is nothing in these pursuits themselves 
which gives them utilitarian and materialistic 
quality, but rather the exclusive selfishness 
with which he has endeavored to hold on to 
and monopolize the fruits of the spirit. 

And so with the corresponding studies in 
the high school. Isolated, they may be charg- 
able with the defects of which they are ac- 
cused. But they are convicted in this respect 
only because they have first been condemned 
to isolation. As representatives of serious 
and permanent interests of humanity, they 
possess an intrinsic dignity which it is the 
business of the educator to take account of. 
To ignore them, to deny them a rightful posi- 
tion in the educational circle, is to maintain 
within society that very cleft between so-called 
material and spiritual interests which it is the 
business of education to strive to overcome. 
These studies root themselves in science ; they 
have their trunk in human history, and they 
flower in the worthiest and fairest forms of 
human service. 

It is for these various reasons that I be- 



7 8 The Educational Situation 

lieve the introduction of the new problem of 
adjustment of studies will help instead of hin- 
der the settlement of the older controversies. 
We have been trying for a long time to fix 
a curriculum upon a basis of certain vague 
and general educational ideals : information, 
utility, discipline, culture. I believe that much 
of our ill success has been due to the lack 
of any well-defined and controllable meaning 
attaching to these terms. The discussion re- 
mains necessarily in the region of mere opinion 
when the measuring rods are subject to change 
with the standpoint and wishes of the individ- 
ual. Take any body of persons, however in- 
telligent and however conscientious, and ask 
them to value and arrange studies from the 
standpoint of culture, discipline, and utility, 
and they will of necessity arrive at very differ- 
ent results, depending upon their own tempera- 
ment and more or less accidental experience 
— and this none the less because of their 
intelligence and conscientiousness. 

With the rounding out of the high school to 
meet all the needs of life, the standard changes. 
It ceases to be these vague abstractions. We 
get, relatively speaking, a scientific problem — 
that is a problem with definite data and defi- 
nite methods of attack. We are no longer 
concerned with the abstract appraisal of studies 



The Educational Situation 79 

by the measuring rod of culture or disci- 
pline. Our problem is rather to study the 
typical necessities of social life, and the actual 
nature of the individual in his specific needs 
and capacities. Our task is on one hand to 
select and adjust the studies with reference to 
the nature of the individual thus discovered ; 
and on the other hand to order and group 
them so that they shall most definitely and 
systematically represent the chief lines of 
social endeavor and social achievement. 

Difficult as these problems may be in prac- 
tice, they are yet inherently capable of solu- 
tion. It is a definite problem, a scientific 
problem, to discover what the nature of the 
individual is and what his best growth calls for. 
It is a definite problem, a scientific problem, 
to discover the typical vocations of society, 
and to find out what groupings of studies will 
be the most likely instruments to subserve these 
vocations. To dissipate the clouds of opin- 
ion, to restrict the influence of abstract and 
conceited argument ; to stimulate the spirit 
of inquiry into actual fact, to further the con- 
trol of the conduct of the school by the truths 
thus scientifically discovered — these are the 
benefits which we may anticipate with the ad- 
vent of this problem of the wider high school. 



III. AS CONCERNS THE COLLEGE. 

The elementary school is, by the necessity 
of the case, in closest contact with the wants 
of the people at large. It is the public-school, 
the common-school, system. It aims at uni- 
versality in its range, at including all children. 
It has a universal basis, coming home to every 
citizen as a taxpayer. The higher institutions 
of learning are less under the control of imme- 
diate public opinion, with the ebb and flow of 
popular sentiment. They are set apart, as it 
were, under the control of specially selected 
leaders. They are dominated by a more con- 
tinuous system of educational principle and 
policy. Their roots are in the past ; they are 
the conservators of the wisdom, insight, and 
resources of bygone ages. While they may 
be part of the state system, yet they touch 
the average citizen in a much less direct way 
than does the elementary school. The sec- 
ondary school is intermediate ; it is between 
the upper and the nether millstone. On one 
side, it is subject to pressure from current pub- 
lic opinion ; on the other, to the pressure of 
university tradition. While the public high 
school is more sensitive in the former direc- 
tion, and the private academy more sensitive 
80 



The Educational Situation 8i 

in the latter, neither one can be free from both 
influences. 

The elementary school has both the advan- 
tages and the disadvantages of its more direct 
contact with public opinion. It is thereby 
more likely to respond promptly to what the 
people currently want. But, on the other 
hand, it is rendered liable to the fluctuations 
and confusions of the public's expression of its 
own needs. The higher institution has the 
advantages and the disadvantage of its greater 
remoteness, its greater isolation. The advan- 
tage is in the possibility of more definite 
leadership by those consistently trained in 
continuous educational standards and methods 
— freedom from the meaningless and arbitrary 
flux and reflux of public sentiment. The dis- 
advantages are summed up in the unfavorable 
connotation of "academic," the suggestion of 
living in the past rather than the present, in 
the cloister rather than the world, in a region 
of abstraction rather than of practice. 

The lower schools are more variable, and 
probably vary too easily and frequently as the 
various winds of public sentiment blow upon 
them. They are freighted with too little bal- 
last. The traditional elementary school cur- 
riculum was so largely a formal thing, there 
was so little of substantial content in it, 



82 The Educational Situation 

that it could not offer much resistance to ex- 
ternal pressure. There was also less ballast in 
the matter of its teaching force, since the 
standard of requirement in scholarship and 
training was so much lower than that of the 
higher schools. But this in no respect detracts 
from their being the public, the common, 
schools — that with which the interests of the 
people are most closely and universally bound 
up. It only emphasizes, after all, the necessity 
of their being responsive to the needs of the 
people, and not to traditions or conventions 
from whatever source they arise. 

The higher institutions are freighted with 
a definite body of tradition. Their curriculum 
represents the enduring experience and thought 
of the centuries. They are the connecting 
links binding us of today with the culture of 
Greece and Rome and Mediaeval Europe. 
They are under the guidance of men who have 
been subjected to uniform training, who have 
been steeped in almost identical ideals, and 
with whom teaching is a profession and not an 
accident. In their method of administration 
they are much more removed from public 
opinion and sentiment than are the elementary 
schools. 

Does this mean, however, that the college 
is relieved of the necessity of meeting public 



The Educational Situation 83 

needs, of acting with reference to social con- 
siderations ; or rather, that its problem, its func- 
tion with reference to this need, is a peculiar and 
distinctive one ? Our answer is unhesitatingly 
the latter. If the college derives more from 
the past, it is only that it may put more effectu- 
ally the resources of the past at the disposi- 
tion of the present. If it is more remote 
from immediate pressure of public demands, 
this should be regarded as imposing a duty, 
not as conferring an otiose privilege. It em- 
phasizes the responsibility of steadying and 
clarifying the public consciousness, of render- 
ing it less spasmodic, less vacillating, less 
confused ; of imparting to it consistency and 
organization. The college has undertaken to 
maintain the continuity of culture. But cul- 
ture should not be a protected industry, living 
at the expense of the freedom and complete- 
ness of present social communication and inter- 
action. The sole reason for maintaining the 
continuity of culture is to make that culture 
operative in the conditions of modern life, of 
daily life, of political and industrial life, if you 
will. 

It is comparatively easy to divorce these 
two functions. At one end of the scale we 
can erect the culture college ; the college 
which, upon the whole, in its curriculum and 



84 The Educational Situation 

methods ignores the demands of the present 
and insists upon the well-rounded and sym- 
metrical education of the past — an education 
which is well-rounded simply because the in- 
sistent demands of the present are kept from 
breaking into it. At the other end of the 
scale is the distinctively professional techno- 
logical school, which prepares specifically and 
definitely for the occupations of the present 
day; and which certa'inly is responding in con- 
sistent and obvious ways to current social needs 
and demands. 

But, speaking for the higher institutions of 
learning as a whole, it is clear that both of 
these types of institutions solve the problem 
by unduly simplifying it. This is not to say 
that each has not its own place. It is only to 
say that that place is not the place of our 
higher institutions of learning taken in their 
entirety. Their problem is to join together 
what is here sundered, the culture factor (by 
which is meant acquaintance with the best 
that has been thought and said and done in 
the past) and the practical factor — or, more 
truly speaking, the social factor, the factor of 
adaptation to the present need. 

But what, you may ask, is the working 
equivalent of this proposition ? What effect 
would the attempt to carry it out have upon 



The Educational Situation 85 

the existing college curriculum and method ? 
How does it bear, for example, upon the 
mooted question of the relation of the lan- 
guages or the humanities to the sciences ? 
What bearing does it have upon the mooted 
question of the required versus the elective 
curriculum ? What bearing does it have upon 
the question of the method of instruction ? 
Shall it be dogmatic and disciplinary, so as to 
secure to the student the advantage of a stable 
point of view and a coherent body of material, 
or shall it be stimulating and liberating, aiming 
at ability to inquire, judge and act for one's 
self? 

The problem of the multiplication of studies, 
of the consequent congestion of the curricu- 
lum, and the conflict of various studies for a 
recognized place in the curriculum ; the fact 
that one cannot get in without crowding some- 
thing else out ; the effort to arrange a com- 
promise in various courses of study by throw- 
ing the entire burden of election upon the stu- 
dent so that he shall make out his own course 
of study — this problem is only a reflex of the 
lack of unity in the social activities themselves, 
and of the necessity of reaching more har- 
mony, more system in our scheme of life. 
This multiplication of study is not primarily 
a product of the schools. The last hundred 



86 The Educational Situation 

years has created a new world, has revealed a 
new universe, material and social. The edu- 
cational problem is not a result of anything 
within our own conscious wish or intention, 
but of the conditions in the contemporary 
world. 

Take, for illustration, the problem of the 
introduction and place of the sciences. I 
suppose all of us sometimes hear arguments 
whose implication is that a certain body of 
self-willed men invented the sciences, and are 
now, because of narrowness of culture, bent 
upon forcing them into prominence in the col- 
lege curriculum. But it needs only to make 
this implication explicit to realize what a trav- 
esty it is. These sciences are the outcome of 
all that makes our modern life what it is. 
They are expressions of the agencies upon 
which the carrying on of our civilization is 
completely dependent. They did not grow 
out of professional, but of human, needs. They 
find their serious application in the schools 
only because they are everywhere having their 
serious application in life. There is no press- 
ing industrial question that has not arisen in 
some new discovery regarding the forces of 
nature, and whose ultimate solution does not 
depend upon some further insight into the 
truths of nature — upon some scientific advance. 



The Educational Situation 8? 

The revolution which is going on in industry 
because of the advance of natural science, in 
turn affects all professions and occupations. 
It touches municipal government as well as 
personal hygiene ; it affects the calling of the 
clergy as significantly, even if more indirectly, 
as that of the lawyer. An intellectual and 
social development of such scope cannot pos- 
sibly take place and not throw our educational 
curriculum into a state of distraction and un- 
certainty. 

When we are asked "Why not leave alone 
all the new subjects not yet well organized 
in themselves, and not well elaborated as 
material for education ; why not confine our- 
selves to the studies which have been taught 
so long as to be organized for purposes of 
instruction?" — when these questions are put 
to us, we come upon a logical self-contradic- 
tion and a practical impossibility. 

The logical contradiction is found in the 
fact that the new studies are not so isolated 
from the old studies as to be lopped off in this 
arbitrary way. In spite of confusion and con- 
flict, the movement of the human mind is a 
unity. The development of the new sciences 
is not a mere addition of so much bulk of in- 
formation to what went before. It represents 
a profound modification and reconstruction of 



88 The Educational Situation 

all attained knowledge — a change in quality 
and standpoint. The existing conflict between 
the sciences and the humanities in the con- 
temporary college curriculum- would not be 
terminated by eliminating the sciences. Pre- 
cisely the same conflict would at once reflect 
itself within what is left over, the languages. 
The scientific method has invaded this region 
and claims it for its own. The lines would 
soon be drawn between those who represent 
the distinctively "scientific" aspects of lan- 
guage — phonology, philology, the strict his- 
torical development, the analytic determina- 
tion of style, etc. — and those upholding the 
banner of pure literary appreciation. The 
point comes out more plainly by inquiring 
what we are to do with the modern social and 
historical sciences. No fact in controversy is 
more recurrent (or more amusing) than that 
while the contestants are struggling in the 
dark, the center of the battle somehow mana- 
ges to remove itself to another point ; and 
when the smoke clears away there is not only 
a new battlefield, but an entirely new point at 
issue. While the struggle between the classi- 
cists and the scientists has been going on, a new 
body of studies has been gradually making its 
way, and is now reaching the point of con- 
scious insistence upon its own claims. His- 



The Educational Situation 89 

tory, sociology, political science, and political 
economy may certainly claim to stand for the 
humanities. Quite as much as any linguistic 
phenomena, they represent fundamental values 
of human life. Yet they are the offspring of 
the scientific method. Apart from underlying 
biological conceptions, apart from the scien- 
tific conception of evolution, apart from that 
more intangible atmosphere which we call the 
scientific spirit, they would neither exist nor 
be making their way into the curriculum. The 
body of knowledge is indeed one ; it is a spir- 
itual organism. To attempt to chop off a mem- 
ber here and amputate an organ there is the 
veriest impossibility. The problem is not one 
of elimination, but of organization; of simpli- 
fication not through denial and rejection, but 
through harmony. 

The simple necessities of modern life would, 
however, force the college to face the problem 
of studies in its entire scope even if the philos- 
ophy of the sciences did not compel it. With 
the perspective of years, it will become clear- 
er and clearer that the distinguishing charac- 
teristic of the nineteenth century is the devel- 
opment of applied science. The earlier years 
inherited the application to mechanics of the 
various uses of steam in the revolutionizing of 
industry. Succeeding years and decades 



QO The Educational Situation 

widened the application to practically all forms 
of chemical and physical energy. The latter 
decades saw the devolopment of the biological 
sciences to the point of application. We do 
not realize as yet the extent of the revolution 
which the profession of medicine is undergo- 
ing because of the ability to make application 
of chemistry, physiology, and bacteriology. 
But it is not merely medicine and public hy- 
giene that are affected. Simple and funda- 
mental industrial processes — agriculture, dai- 
rying, etc. — are being invaded more and more 
by applied science. The bacteriologist comes 
home to us, not only in the treatment of dis- 
ease, but in the making of our butter, and 
cheese, and beer. The hour could be easily 
spent in simply mentioning the multiple and 
important points of contact between science 
and the affairs of daily life. The beginning of 
a new century surely sees us upon the verge of 
an analogous translation of political and moral 
science into terms of application. 

Now it is absurd to the point of fatuity to 
say, under such circumstances, we will restrict 
our curriculum to a certain group of studies ; 
we will not introduce others because they 
have not been part of the classic curriculum 
of the past, and consequently are not yet well 
organized for educational purposes. The prob- 



The Educational Situation 9^ 

lem which the college has to face is not one 
which has grown up within the college walls, 
nor which is confined there. The ferment 
which is happily going on in the college is 
because the leaven of all modern life is at 
work. There seems a certain lack of perspec- 
tive, a certain lack of sanity and balance in 
those arguments regarding the college curric- 
ulum that assume that subjects are already 
in a settled condition ; that there are ready- 
made standards by which to measure their vari- 
ous claims ; and that it only remains to pick 
out just so much of this and so much of that 
and put an end to all the confusion and con- 
flict which is troubling us. Until the various 
branches of human learning have attained 
something like philosophic organization, until 
the various modes of their application to life 
have been so definitely and completely worked 
out as to bring even the common affairs of 
life under direction, confusion and conflict are 
bound to continue. When we have an ade- 
quate industrial and political organization it 
will be quite time to assume that there is 
some offhand and short-cut solution to the 
problem of educational organization. In the 
meantime it is somewhat ridiculous to argue as 
if there were somewhere a definite set of speci- 
fic educational recipes which the managers of 



9 2 The Educational Situation 



the collegiate institutions might fall back upon, 
and then serve out just such and such an intel- 
lectual diet to those eager for the intellectual 
feast. 

I have been speaking, thus far, of the prob- 
lem as it presents itself on the side of the cur- 
riculum — on the side of the multiplication and 
conflict of studies. When we turn to the 
matter of aims and methods, the moral end 
and the fundamental intellectual attitude 
involved, we do not find the state of things 
much changed. We talk, to be sure, about 
character, and information, and discipline, and 
culture as setting our aims and controlling our 
methods. We ignore the fact that every gen- 
eration must redefine these terms for itself, if 
they are to retain vitality. We speak as if each 
of these terms had a perfectly definite and 
well-recognized meaning attaching to it ; we 
appear to believe that some sort of mathemat- 
ical ratio is possible — that by taking such a 
per cent, of culture, such a per cent, of training, 
such a per cent, of useful information, we may 
get a well-rounded education. Or, to take the 
problem in its more burning form, we imagine 
that we have just such and such a ratio between 
the authoritative determination of material for 
the student and his own personal choice — 
assuming that there is a certain ratio between 



The Educational Situation 93 

external discipline and the play of individuality 
in the determination of character. All our 
universities are face to face, moreover, with 
the problem of the adjustment of what is 
ordinarily regarded as the strictly disciplinary 
and culture element in the curriculum to the 
professional element — the preparation for law, 
medicine, theology, or whatever. The common 
expedient, the device which works well on the 
practical side, is to allow the last year of the 
college course to count on both sides — for the 
degree which stands for general culture and 
discipline and also for the degree that stands 
for specific professional training. Turn from 
the matter of practical expediency and success 
to that of the philosophy of education, and 
what does this compromise mean ? In terms 
of fundamental values, what is the relation 
between general culture and professional 
ability ? 

When we go below the surface, most of us, 
I think, would admit that we are in very great 
doubt as to what these terms really mean in 
themselves, to say nothing of their definite 
relationship to each other. What do we mean 
by character as a supreme end, or even inci- 
dental end, of college education ? The topic 
lends itself gracefully to purposes of orations 
in which no cross-examination is permitted ; 



94 The Educational Sittsation 

but suppose one of us had to answer, honestly 
and definitely, what he took to be the exact 
connection between each of the studies of the 
college course, and each daily lesson in each 
study, and the attainment of a right char- 
acter — what would the answer be ? Indeed, 
just exactly what is the character at which we 
are aiming, or ought to aim, under modern 
conditions ? Character involves not only right 
intentions, but a certain degree of efificiency. 
Now efficiency, as biologists have made us 
well aware, is a problem of adaptation, of 
adjustment to the control of conditions. Are 
the conditions of modern life so clear and so 
settled that we know exactly what organs, 
what moral habits and methods, are necessary 
in order to get the maximum of efificiency ? 
Do we know how to adjust our teaching to 
securing this maximum ? 

Great as are the difficulties in reaching an 
adequate definition of what we mean by char- 
acter and its relation to education, the prob- 
lem is slight compared with what meets us 
when we ask about the significance of the terms 
discipline and culture. 

What is discipline? I find the same per- 
sons who, in one connection, emphasize the 
necessity of conducting education so as to give 
training, are often also the persons who, in 



The Educational Situation 95 

another connection, object to a certain kind of 
work on the very ground that it gives too much 
and too specific training. He who upholds 
the banner of discipline in classics or mathe- 
matics, when it comes to the training of a man 
for the profession of a teacher or investigator, 
will often be found to condemn a school of 
commerce, or technology, or even of medicine, 
in the university on the ground that it is too 
professional in character — that it smacks of 
the utilitarian and commercial. The kind of 
discipline which enables a man to pursue one 
vocation is lauded ; the kind of training that 
fits him for another is condemned. Why this 
invidious distinction ? The only clew to an 
answer that I have ever been able to get is the 
assumption of some mysterious difference 
between a general training and a special train- 
ing — as if the training that the man got in 
the study of Latin and Greek were somehow 
distinctively the training appropriate to man 
as man, while the training which he gets in the 
application of, say, mathematics and physics 
to engineering, or of history, geography, and 
political economy to commerce, only touches 
some narrow segment or fraction of the man. 
Whence the justification of any such assump- 
tion ? Is not the whole man required in the 
calling of an engineer or a captain of industry? 



96 The Educational Sittiation 

If the whole man does not at present find 
opportunity and outlet for himself in these 
callings, is it not one of the main duties of the 
university to bring about precisely this result ? 
The assumption that a training is good in gen- 
eral just in the degree in which it is good for 
nothing in particular is one for which it would 
be difficult to find any adequate philosophic 
ground. Training, discipline, must finally be 
measured in terms of application, of avail- 
ability. To be trained is to be trained to 
something and for something. 

This brings me to the question of culture. 
Doubtless, the current implication is that gen- 
eral culture and professional utility are quite 
independent of each other. The notio-n of 
absolute antagonism is, doubtless, wearing 
away. Like the similar conception of a fixed 
and obvious gulf between the elect and the un- 
regenerated, it cannot stand the pressure of the 
free communication and interaction of modern 
life. It is no longer possible to hug com- 
placently the ideal that the academic teacher 
is perforce devoted to high spiritual ideals, 
while the doctor, lawyer, and man of business 
are engaged in the mercenary pursuit of vulgar 
utilities. But we have hardly reconstructed 
our theory of the whole matter. Our concep- 
tion of culture is still tainted with inheritance 



The Educational Sittiation 97 

from the period of the aristocractic seclusion 
of a leisure class — leisure meaning relief from 
participation in the work of a workaday world. 
Culture, to use the happy phrase of one of my 
colleagues, has been prized largely as a means 
of "invidious distinction." If I were to venture 
into what might appear to you the metaphysical 
field, I think I could also show that the current 
idea of culture belongs to the pre-biological 
period — it is a survival of the time when mind 
was conceived as an independent entity living 
in an elegant isolation from its environment. 
We come back here to the root of the whole 
matter. To very many the idea of culture 
covers adequately and completely that for 
which the college stands. Even to suggest 
that the college should do what the people 
want is to lay unholy hands on the sanctity of 
the college ideal. The people, the mob, the 
majority, want anything but culture — indeed 
they are capable of anything but culture. The 
college stands for the remnant. It is the 
fortress of the few who are capable of uphold- 
ing high ideals against the utilitarian clamor 
of the many. To ask that the colleges do 
what society wants done is to surrender or 
compromise the idea of culture by requiring 
the introduction of the professional factor — a 
preparation for specific callings in life, 



9^ The Educational Situation 

All this, I say frankly and emphatically, I 
regard as a survival from a dualistic past — 
from a society which was dualistic politically, 
drawing fixed lines between classes, and dual- 
istic intellectually, with its rigid separation 
between the things of matter and of mind — 
between the affairs of the world and of the 
spirit. Social democracy means an abandon- 
ment of this dualism. It means a common 
heritage, a common work, and a common 
destiny. It is flat hostility to the ethics of 
modern life to suppose that there are two dif- 
ferent aims of life located on different planes ; 
that the few who are educated are to live on 
a plane of exclusive and isolated culture, 
while the many toil below on the level of 
practical endeavor directed at material com- 
modity. The problem of our modern life is 
precisely to do away with all the barriers that 
keep up this division. If the university can- 
not accommodate itself to this movement, so 
much the worse for it. Nay, more; it is 
doomed to helpless failure unless it does more 
than accommodate itself; unless it becomes 
one of the chief agencies for bridging the gap, 
and bringing about an effective interaction of 
all callings in society. 

This may seem pretty abstract, rather re- 
mote, in its actual bearing upon college affairs^ 



The Educational Situation 99 

but there is a definite body of fact by which 
to give this general statement concreteness, 

I have already referred to the fact that we 
are living in a period of applied science. What 
this means for present purposes is that the 
professions, the practical occupations of men, 
are becoming less and less empirical routines, 
or technical facilities acquired through unin- 
telligent apprenticeship. They are more and 
more infused with reason ; more and more il- 
luminated by the spirit of inquiry and reason. 
They are dependent upon science, in a word. 
To decline to recognize this intimate connec- 
tion of professions in modern life with the 
discipline and culture that come from the pur- 
suit of truth for its own sake, is to be at least 
one century behind the times. I do not say 
that the engineer, the doctor, or lawyer, or 
even the clergyman, or the average man of 
commerce, has as yet awakened to the full 
necessity of this interdependence of theory 
and practice, to the full significance of the ex- 
tent to which his activities are already depend- 
ent upon knowledge of the truth and the right 
attitude toward truth. I do not say that the 
professional classes are as yet fully aware of 
the dignity and elevation that thus come to 
their practical callings in life. But this very 

absence of clear and complete consciousness 
LofC. ^ 



loo The Educational Situation 

only makes the duty of the university the 
clearer. It is so to order its affairs that the 
availability of truth for life, and the depend- 
ence of the professional occupations upon sci- 
ence — upon insight into an ordered body of 
fact, and mastery of methods — shall become 
patent to all men. 

Society needs the junction of that expert 
knowledge and skilled discipline which the 
college alone can supply, and the services of 
the professions, the businesses of life. All the 
forces and tendencies of college instruction 
and administration are tending irresistibly, 
even if blindly, in this direction. To say that 
the reality of the present university is profes- 
sional training would perhaps give little other 
than material for misunderstanding. It would 
seem to mean that what most would regard as 
the important and essential feature of the uni- 
versity was a mere preliminary or incident, 
and that the reality is located in the schools 
of medicine, law, engineering, etc. This is not 
what is meant. I do mean, however, that the 
business of the university is coming to_be more 
and more the supplying of that specific knowl- 
edge and that specific training which shall fit 
the individual for his calling in life. Just how 
the tendency shall work itself out on the 
formal and external side is a matter of com- 



The Educational Situation loi 

paratively little moment. The fact is sure 
that the intellectual and moral lines which 
divide the university courses in science and 
letters from those of professional schools are 
gradually getting obscure and are bound finally 
to fade away. 

What is termed general training and general 
culture is the function of the secondary school. 
A recent writer has stated that the college is 
threatened with attack from two sources : the 
high school on one side, the professional 
school on the other. This exactly states the 
situation to my mind — excepting that I should 
not regard these instrumentalities as foes, but 
rather as the twofold differentiation of func- 
tion which the old-time amorphous college is 
assuming. 

Formally, the first two years of college 
work probably belong to the secondary period. 
This is not the place or time to go into the 
question of what is meant by general training 
and its relation to secondary-school work. It 
certainly means, however, that the pupil shall 
be touched, shall be stimulated, on all sides ; 
that he shall be given a survey, at least, of the 
universe in its manifold phases. Through this 
survey, through this elaboration, coming to 
know both himself and the universe, he may 
get his orientation — his placing of himself in 



102 The Educational Situation 

the larger world. With proper economy of 
instruction, and harmonious organization in- 
stead of blind confusion in the curriculum, 
this result should certainly be attained by the 
time the average student is eighteen or twenty. 

Having found himself, a student would then 
be prepared to enter upon that special training 
which is needed to equip him for the particu- 
lar calling in life which he finds adapted to his 
own powers. This, by whatever name called, 
is professional training. The extent to which 
our larger universities have already moved in 
this direction is concealed, first, by the fact 
that they still retain considerable secondary 
work in the earlier years of their course ; and 
secondly, by the fact that training for the 
calling of teaching, or of special research, is 
marked off in the public mind from training 
for the calling of doctor, lawyer, or engineer. 
In reality, the kind of training which students 
receive to make them professors, or directors 
of laboratories is, of course, as professional 
as is that of the school of technology or 
medicine. 

There is still, however, a great deal of 
reconstructive work to be done. There is 
still a good deal of so-called higher college 
or university work which is thoroughly 
anomalous in character. It is neither one 



The Educational Situation 103 

thing nor the other. It does not give that 
kind of education which awakens the student 
to a sense of his own powers and their relation 
to the world of action ; nor does ii afford 
specific training for any particular walk in life. 
It is neither genuinely secondary nor yet mani- 
festly collegiate in character. It is aimed in 
the air with the pious hope that something 
will come of it somewhere and somehow. 
Those who insist on the maintenance of the 
traditional college free from supposed en- 
croachments of the high school on one side 
and the professional school on the other, are 
definitely contending, to my mind, for the per- 
petuation of this amorphous and artifical thing. 
Historically, the college, like the mediaeval 
university, was a great vocational institution. 
Its original business was to prepare primarily 
for the ministry, and incidentally for other 
learned professions. That function gradually 
departed from it, and it took on more and 
more the form of an institution for general 
culture. Now the high school is appropriat- 
ing this function, and in its legitimate ex- 
tension is bound to absorb more and more of 
it. To give just more general culture at large, 
after the specific period for it has ceased ; to 
prepare in a loose and vague way for future 
life — this is the anomaly to be corrected by 



104 The Educational Situation 

restoring to the college its position as a voca- 
tional institution. 

The movement is steady and, I believe, in- 
evitable in one direction. There is to be a 
demarcation of the college into secondary 
work on one side, and into training for voca- 
tions on the other. The secondary period will 
be that of individual training and culture, 
awakening the mind to true self-conscious- 
ness — to a knowledge of self in its needs and 
capacities in relation to life about it, thus 
restoring to it freshness and vitality. The 
collegiate institution will then be an affair for 
specific training; for securing control of those 
specialized systems of knowledge and methods 
of research which fit the individual for the pur- 
suit of his own calling in life. 

All of us have callings, occupations — only 
the,^ luxuriously idle and the submerged idle, 
only the leisure class of fashion and of pauper- 
ism violate this law. When higher education 
ceases to ignore the universality and signifi- 
cance, ethical as well as material, of this fact 
of occupations, when it recognizes it frankly 
and fully, and adapts its curriculum and 
methods to it, the college will be coherent in 
itself and in relation to the social whole. It 
is movement in the direction of the union of 
truth and use that defines the problems and 
aims of the existing collegiate situation. 



;riBa^-«ll©^ 



JAN SO 1902 



